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"I have nothing revolutionary or even novel to offer."
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Exlpore more Nothing quotes
"Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable."
"Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!"
"It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing."
"The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything."
"Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing."
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."
"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."
"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."
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