The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.
Michael HowardPeople often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into disastrous decisions and miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign societies with which they have to deal.
Michael Howard