When I was very young, I was suitably impressed to learn that, appearances notwithstanding, the whale is not a fish. Nowadays these questions of classification move me less; and it does not worry me unduly when I am assured that history is not a science. This terminological question is an eccentricity of the English language. In every other European language, the equivalent word to ‘science’ includes history without hesitation.

[...] the real importance of the Darwinian revolution was that Darwin, completing what Lyell had already begun in geology, brought history into science.

History is movement; and movement implies comparison.

Man’s capacity to rise above his social and historical situation seems to be conditioned by the sensitivity with which he recognizes the extent of his involvement in it.

The desire to postulate individual genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of historical consciousness.