Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. — Leo Tolstoy. Russian writer (1828–1910)
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conlusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleages, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.