Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison is throwing a cold bucket of water on the historian’s oldest temptation: to turn the past into a tidy morality play where the “right” side wins because it was always destined to. The warning is aimed as much at craft as at character. Enthusiasm - the joy of a good story, admiration for a hero, even righteous outrage - can tilt the narrative until it starts to read like a courtroom closing argument. That’s when history quietly becomes propaganda with footnotes.

The line works because it attacks hindsight as a psychological addiction. Once we know the ending, we smuggle necessity into every earlier scene: this reform “had to” happen, that empire “was bound” to fall, this war “was inevitable.” Morison insists the historian’s job is to reopen contingency, to restore the lived uncertainty of people who didn’t know what came next. “A thousand changes and chances” is deliberately tactile phrasing, a reminder that big forces never arrive unfiltered; they’re mediated by accidents, misjudgments, weather, illness, technology, personality, timing.

Context matters: Morison wrote in a century drenched in grand narratives - nationalism, Marxism, progress talk, postwar triumphalism - each eager to claim history as proof. His pushback isn’t anti-interpretation; it’s a demand for intellectual humility. The ethical subtext is clear: if outcomes aren’t foreordained, then responsibility doesn’t vanish into “historical necessity.” People chose, failed, panicked, improvised. A good historian honors that messiness, not because it makes the story less dramatic, but because it makes it truer - and keeps readers from mistaking inevitability for wisdom.