"You know that 19th century commonplace, "If you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it?" That's what most people think is the reason why you do history: you're doomed to repeat it.
Historians don't think you're doomed to repeat it. Historians don't think in cycles of history, the way they did in say, the fourteenth century. We think in terms of arrows of time.
You're not doomed to repeat anything. What you're doomed to do is to continue it. Early modern Europe has established so much of the modern world, and so many of the ideas that we have in our brain, were thought up once upon a time, for some reason that made sense—perhaps, perhaps not—at that time.
We continue to have those ideas inside our heads and we don't even realize that they are products of history. Unless you understand the history, you have no choice to examine those ideas and decide whether or not they make sense, or that they are moral, or they have anything to do with you, or your culture.
And so it's only by understanding your whole world as a historical product, and specifically as a product of early modern Europe, that you can do anything to change your world."
This is one of those times I read something that I know I'll find myself quoting for a long time to come. Thanks for that.