The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

Ambrose frames historical study as more than nostalgia: the past yields usable knowledge—examples, warnings, and hard-won lessons—while the future remains the realm of aspiration. The final sentence links the two in a moral-psychological claim: to genuinely love the past (to attend to it carefully and respectfully) is to believe that human experience is intelligible and that learning can shape what comes next. In this view, history underwrites civic and personal hope by showing that change is possible and that choices matter. The quote also implicitly defends the historian’s vocation as future-oriented, not merely retrospective.