-
Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.
-
I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity. I know you'd better focus on the good stuff or you're screwed.
-
Rather an end in horror, than horror without end. He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later. The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot him all the same if we have to. The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,Does this improve me?, not look at the possible fringe benefits If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.
-
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
-
The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.
-
We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
-
Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.
-
History is not history unless it is the truth.
-
A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.
-
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
