The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well:

The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.

The best writing is rewriting.

One must always be civic-minded.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

rewriting is the essence of writing.

To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.

Strictly speaking, every one must educate himself.

Humans, being creative, can rewrite anything.
...which is a coy way of suggesting that each young generation invents history according to its own bigotries. The rewritten history gets quoted to show that one or another special group has perpetually saved civilization while suffering abuse known only to holy saints. The justification for historians is the same as the justification for janitors. Both sweep up the mess when the public gets done trashing.

The first duty of a man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth.

Who belongs in the encyclopedia? Who has a seat at the table? We’re figuring these questions out as we’re going, but we’re doing it in such a way that it becomes available to the rest of the world...It’s incredible to me to think about that. That’s what academia should have been all along.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves.