“How much better we would understand the habits and nature of man if there were more historians like Julius Caesar, or even like Niccolo Machiavelli. Remembering the sharp and devastating character of their rough notes, think what marvelous histories Bismarck and Fredrick the Great might have written,
Such men are privy to the facts; the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses. Again, such men know how to tell the truth, however unpleasant; they are wholly free of that puerile moral obsession which marks the professor….But how seldom it is that they tell it.”
- H.L. Mencken (DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, pp. 32)
Such men are privy to the facts; the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses. Again, such men know how to tell the truth, however unpleasant; they are wholly free of that puerile moral obsession which marks the professor….But how seldom it is that they tell it.”
- H.L. Mencken (DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, pp. 32)