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.
Interpretation
Intellectual honesty is crucial for historians in free societies, but it is often not fully achieved.
In a free society, historians are expected to exhibit intellectual honesty, meaning they should present facts and truths without bias or deception. However, Morison suggests that while this expectation is prevalent, the fulfillment of such honesty is rare, highlighting a gap between public expectation and actual practice in historical scholarship.
In practice
In a lecture about the importance of ethics in historical writing.
But sea power has never led to despotism. The nations that have enjoyed sea power even for a brief period-Athens, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, the United States-are those that have preserved freedom for themselves and have given it to others. Of the despotism to which unrestrained military power leads we have plenty of examples from Alexander to Mao.
The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.
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.
No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power.
Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.
A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion. . . . A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.
There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.
The melancholy joys of evils pass'd, For he who much has suffer'd, much will know.
It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.
In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.
Long ago I yearned to be a hero without knowing, in truth, what a hero was. Now, perhaps, I understand it a little better. A grower of turnips or a shaper of clay, a Commot farmer or a king--every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone. Once you told me that the seeking counts more than the finding. So, too, must the striving count more than the gain.
Don't be afraid of mistakes - There are none.
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