Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel E. Morison

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American historian Samuel E. Morison.

Last updated on December 22, 2024.

Samuel Eliot Morison was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959). In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the American People (1965), and co-authored the classic textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930) with Henry Steele Commager.

American - Historian | July 9, 1887 - May 15, 1976

Source: Wikipedia

The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

Samuel E. Morison

With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.

Samuel E. Morison

Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis.

Samuel E. Morison

If a lecturer, he wishes to be heard; if a writer, to be read. He always hopes for a public beyond that of the long-suffering wife.

Samuel E. Morison

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.

Samuel E. Morison

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.

Samuel E. Morison

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.

Samuel E. Morison

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

Samuel E. Morison

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

Samuel E. Morison

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.

Samuel E. Morison

I have nothing revolutionary or even novel to offer.

Samuel E. Morison

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

Samuel E. Morison

Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.

Samuel E. Morison

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

Samuel E. Morison

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Samuel E. Morison