The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
None of the great discoveries was made by a 'specialist' or a 'researcher'.
No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.
I have no academic qualifications whatsoever.
No study is possible on the battlefield.
No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
History provides no precise guidelines.
Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.