Donald Kagan

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states