Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison’s line is a cool, almost prosecutorial compliment: in “free countries,” the public demands at least one virtue from historians - intellectual honesty - and then quietly lowers the bar on everything else. The sting is in the asymmetry. Citizens who can argue, vote, and publish freely still approach history with a consumer’s expectation: don’t lie to me, but don’t make this too difficult, too uncertain, too morally complicated. The phrase “much more than that it does not expect” reads like an indictment of a marketplace where history is valued less as inquiry than as reassurance.

The subtext is about the fragile contract between expert and audience. Intellectual honesty is not the same as neutrality, completeness, or courage. It’s the minimum viable ethic: handle sources straight, don’t rig the story. Morison implies that even this baseline is intermittently unmet - “nor often get” - because public appetite rewards other traits: narrative swagger, patriotic uplift, clean villains, a usable past. In democracies, the pressure to please isn’t imposed by a censor so much as by tastes, institutions, and the quiet economics of attention.

Context matters: Morison was a celebrated Harvard historian writing in an American century that wanted grand national stories and wartime coherence. His sentence defends professional standards while conceding that the public’s “expectations” are politically shaped. Freedom doesn’t automatically produce intellectual rigor; it just relocates the temptations. Historians can be honest and still be ignored. Or they can be adored for something else entirely.