It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead. – E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments. – Friedrich August von Hayek