Enough Folly is Enough

"Amateur historians, and even some professional ones, seem to believe that there is such a thing as a theory of history which lifts our sights above the kaleidoscope of events and helps us recognise vast and uniform movements that are to events as tides are to choppy whitecaps. When such movements are looked at in detail, they often turn out to be neither uniform, nor going one way, nor due to a dominant cause. Their uniformity is a subjective impression in the eye of the beholder. They nonetheless remain as parts of the folklore."