Marc Bloch

"Medieval people were not primitive; they were different."

"A society's relationship to nature reveals its fundamental values."

"The historian's imagination must be disciplined by evidence."

"Class relations are written into the very landscape."

"We study the dead to better understand the living."

"Historical change is neither progress nor decline; it is transformation."

"The study of institutions is the study of power."

"Memory and history are perpetual antagonists."

"A single village, studied deeply, can illuminate an entire civilization."

"The historian who thinks he is objective is deceiving himself."

"Rituals and ceremonies are windows into a society's soul."

"We cannot understand revolution without understanding evolution."

"The past is dead only if we kill it with our indifference."

"Feudal lords and peasants were locked in relationships of mutual obligation."

"Language changes reveal changes in consciousness."

"The historian must love the dead."

"What people ate, wore, and built tells us who they really were."

"History is the science of things that do not repeat themselves."

"Markets and prices are social constructions, not natural facts."

"The village church was the center of medieval life in ways urbanites forget."

"We inherit structures we did not create; that is the human condition."

"The historian must learn to listen to what is left unsaid."

"Economic stress reveals the true nature of social bonds."

"Authority is always questioned; some societies just hide the questions better."

"The past offers no lessons; it offers examples."

"Agricultural rhythms shaped human consciousness before industry did."

"A society's myths reveal its anxieties."

"The historian's work is never finished; each generation rewrites the past."

"Feudalism was more humane in some ways than capitalism, and less in others."

"We are the past looking back at itself."