Greg’s Reviews > The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It. > Status Update

In a word, we appear to assign an arbitrarily chosen and strictly pendulumlike rhythm to realities to which such regularity is entirely alien. It is an impossible task. Naturally we do very badly at it. We must look for something better.

A word is valued much less for its etymology than for the use to which it is put.

The textbooks, always admirable tools of sclerosis…

Anyone who took part in the Battle of Waterloo knew that Napoleon was beaten. Any witness so singular as to deny the defeat we should regard as a liar. Moreover, if we confine ourselves to the simple, blunt statement, there are not very many different ways of saying that Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo.

Romanticism wished to steep itself in the living spring of the primitive, as well as in that of the popular. So it was that the periods which were the most bound by tradition were also those which took the greatest liberties with their true heritage. It is as if, in a curious compensation for an irresistible creative urge, that were naturally led, by sheer force of their veneration of the past, to invent it.

Our War College and General Staff are not the only institutions in France which have preserved the mentality of the oxcart in the age of the automobile.

Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.

I can conceive of no higher praise for a writer than to be able to speak in the same tone to savants and schoolboys alike, but so noble a simplicity is the privilege of the select few.