"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it
is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and
thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing
yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do
until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of
history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G.
Collingwood
