Quotes from Samuel Eliot Morison

Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as a clipper ship.

Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

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.

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

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.

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

In human affairs there is no snug harbor, no rest short of the grave. We are forever setting forth afresh across new and stormy seas, or into outer space.

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.

America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.