Gordon S. Wood

“In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately.”

“Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.”

“Much of history is fragmentary and essentially anachronistic – condemning the past for not being more like the present. It has no real interest in the pastness of the past.”