"The historian's business is to know the past, not to know the future, and whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history."
From John Lewis Gaddis's The Landscape of History (63): "Anyone seeking to establish "the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature," Collingwood warns, is bound to have mistaken "the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life."