Douglas Hurd Quotes

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Everyday decision-making around the world is constantly based on what came before us.

History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances.

Nobody knows what really happened in any historical period. There are some periods where we know more than others, though.

I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring.

Unpredictability means what it means. I don't know how you define it. It is what it is.

A lot of things can't be modeled very well.

I believe that nothing is more important to our ability to effectively address our present than understanding the lessons learned from those who have come before us.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

History is only a feeble light, for the rubrics were meant to answer future problems unimagined and unimaginable

There's no certainty in the law.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

No single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present.

You can learn a lot about the roots of your own beliefs and your own arguments by looking at history in ways that are difficult to do in the intensity of the moment now.

The future is inherently uncertain.

I believe we need to learn from our past.

Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.

I believe history and tradition is something solid and something we can rest on. I am not crazy about putting new spices in chocolate.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

I have not the most definite designs on the future.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.