Samuel E. Morison Quotes

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.

I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.

I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

The vast majority of students probably emerge from college with an adequate grasp of no more than a single method of inquiry. Even this capacity may erode over time if it does not relate to experiences and problems that recur in the student's later life.

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

I'm instinctively cautious because I'm an academic.

The best scientists that I've met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.

Scientists and academics in particular focus on detail and the minutiae. When they talk to each other, they usually don't focus on the broad ideas; they don't focus on social interconnectedness. They focus on the task that they're doing.

Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves.

One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.

You should have a fund of knowledge of something and out of that you make up you mind.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

I don't view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method. I'm constantly looking at what's the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I'm interested in solving.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

The good historian is not for any time or any country: while he loves his fatherland, he never flatters it in anything.