It is significant that the nationalization of thought has proceded everywhere pari passu with the nationalization of industry.

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

Change is certain. Progress is not.

The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context