19 Quotes by Samuel Eliot 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.

America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few hints as to literary craftsmanship may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!