Samuel Eliot Morison

“A historian should be merciless to himself, merciless to his sources, and merciless to his readers.”

“History is a great giver of solace.”

“It is the sea that gives to history its mystery.”

“Clio, the muse of history, is as poor a musician as she is a good composer.”

“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.”

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

“A university is a community of scholars.”

“The purpose of history is to explain the present—to say why the world around us is the way it is.”

“Woe to the country that has no heroes, but woe also to the country that needs them.”

“Dream dreams, then write them down—and watch them come true.”

“The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of ghosts.”

“History is not a morality play.”

“The good historian, like the good novelist, must have a passionate partiality for the past.”

“The great historians have been men of action.”