When I was in college, I remember a professor said — and he was right. He said that every age has to rewrite history, so it can understand it. The truth — so I’d never — this has always grated on me. I don’t believe that, because if we write, if we rewrite history, so we at this moment understand it, we’re never going to learn a damn thing from it, and that’s the problem. ((Edgar Degas, Skip And Hop))

And so, generally if I had one thing in mind, trying to write history as close as accurate and as close as to what actually happened and trying to get into the minds as far as possible of the people who were performing it, and not judging them particularly by our standards today, because if you do that, you don’t understand the history. ((Et Cetera Et Cetera Pt. 2)) You don’t understand them. And I get even more profound — that way we do not understand ourselves, we don’t understand the human race.