We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.

One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.