History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this. Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here. If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.
History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. History is a science, no less and no more. History is past politics and politics present history. We teach history only when it can be made into an entertaining anecdote, a procedure which is about as sound as leaving the teaching of sexual hygiene to a commercial traveller. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.