So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

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

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

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

Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as a clipper ship.

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.

If the European discovery had been delayed for a century or two, it is possible that the Aztec in Mexico or the Iroquois in North America would have established strong native states capable of adopting European war tactics and maintaining their independence to this day, as Japan kept her independence from China.