Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison’s jab lands because it flips the usual hierarchy of the academy: instead of treating “method” as the sacred foundation, he treats it as a talky substitute for the only credential that matters - producing history worth reading. The first sentence is blunt on purpose, less an argument than a refusal. It signals a working historian’s impatience with professionalization for its own sake, the way seminars can turn craft into catechism.

The second clause sharpens into a dare: “I shall never give one myself.” Morison isn’t just criticizing a course; he’s staking reputation against a rising mid-century tendency to formalize historical practice into something teachable, testable, and therefore bureaucratic. His subtext is that method becomes a credentialing ritual - a way to police the guild - and that the people most invested in method-talk may be the least able (or least willing) to demonstrate it in public, where prose, narrative choices, and evidence have to survive scrutiny.

Then comes the kill shot: colleagues who teach methodology “refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.” It’s a line engineered to embarrass. Morison implies that methodological instruction can become a refuge for the unproductive, a rhetorical shield that sounds rigorous while avoiding the risk of interpretation. The irony is surgical: the very people promising to teach you how history is made aren’t making any.

Context matters: Morison wrote in an era when history was tugged between literary narrative and increasingly social-scientific, theory-forward approaches. His quip defends history as practiced art - archival grit plus storytelling discipline - and warns that a field can mistake self-description for substance.