History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. 1 Self-knowledge is the dispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual. 2 And history should forever remind us the limits of our passing perspectives. 3 It should strength us to resist the pressure to convert momentary impulses into moral absolutes. 4 It should lead us to acknowledge our profound and chastening frailty as human beings—to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly displayed, that the future outwits all our certitudes and that the possibilities of the future are various than the human intellect is designed to conceive. A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to manage the tragic temptations of military power. 5 Let us not bully our way through life, but let a growing sensitivity of history temper and civilize our use of power. In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. 6 History is never a closing book or a final verdict. It is forever in the making. Let historians never forsake the quest for knowledge in the interests of an ideology, a religion, a race, a nation. 7 The great strength of history in a free society is it capacity for self-correction. 8 This is the endless excitement of historical writing—the search to reconstruct that went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms (棱镜) that continually place old questions in a new light. 9 History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because explore the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. 10 Because in the end, a nation's history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians like its citizens.