In carefully scrutinizing the affairs of the past, we find that there are many different opinions about them, and that there are some things that are quite unclear. It is better to regard such things as unknowable.

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

So hard is it to discover the truth, because the history of past ages is rendered difficult by the lapse of time; while in contemporary history the truth is always obscured, either by private spite and hatred, or by a desire to curry favour with the chief men of the time.

Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.

Because it is so unbelievable, the truth often escapes being known.

Nothing is more surprising than the surprises of history, and nothing more untrustworthy than the uncritical extrapolation of the tendencies of the recent past.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

At times truth may not seem probable.

It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future.

Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

The truth, however, was stranger still.

The past is more than a memory.

It must be recognized that the real truths of history are hard to discover. Happily, for the most part, they are rather matters of curiosity than of real importance.