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"Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history."
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"We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes."
"History shows us that people often make mistakes, they give wrong decisions, they vote for the wrong persons! And history also shows us that in the end they pay a heavy price for it!"
"If somebody tells you 'History will never forgive you,' just laugh at him! Because when the history comes, you won't be here! The threat of history never forgives you is a useless threat!"
"Throughout the human history millions have died because of the kings and the queens, because of the presidents and the prime ministers, because of the Caesars and the duces, because of all these little charlatans with big ego!"
"Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force."
"When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed."
Explore more quotes by Samuel E. Morison
"With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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