Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

One learns more from defeat than from victory.

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

Military and absolutist regimes are undoubtedly well fitted to get the jump on an unsuspecting or unprepared enemy; but the history of modern warfare proves that they cannot win over representative governments in the long run, provided that people behind those governments have the heart to sustain initial punishment, and both the will and the resources to fight back.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.