Everyone agrees to that; but when we come to define truth, dissension starts.

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.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

I have nothing revolutionary or even novel to offer.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.