Wish I'd said that - May 14, 2020

“The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, pose equal difficulties to the historian... Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to compare, and to conjecture: and though he ought never to place his conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and of the sure operation of its fierce and unrestrained passions, might, on some occasions, supply the want of historical materials.”

Edward Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire