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What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

History provides a laboratory in which we see played out the actual, as well as the intended, consequences of ideas.

We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea.

History devours, but at times it resurrects. Some lives must wait for history to catch up.