Wish I'd said that - April 4, 2019

Machiavelli’s advice about walking in the footsteps of the great “makes two points: first, that we’re bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it’s the only data base we have and second, that we might as well try to do so systematically. E.H. Carr... observed, in What Is History?, that the size and reasoning capacity of the human brain are probably no greater now than they were five thousand years ago, but that very few human beings live now as they did then.... ‘History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another.’”

John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History