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"Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get."
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Exlpore more Quality quotes
"The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim."
"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists."
"What is easy is seldom excellent."
"It is not how fast a tree grows, but how well. It is not how big a fruit is, but how sweet."
"Quality is better than quantity."
Explore more quotes by Samuel E. Morison
"Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis."
"Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything."
"So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out."
"Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances."
"Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances."
"Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces."
"In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not."
"Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history."
"The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind."
"Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses."
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