Neil Peart Quotes

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the past

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future.

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

Indemnity for the past and security for the future.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

It is history that teaches us to hope.

All of us benefit from remembering our past. A people which remembers does not repeat past errors; instead, it looks with confidence to the challenges of the present and the future.

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats.

What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.

You did what was right for those who agreed with you, and that is all in the past. We are talking about our future. Oliver, we cannot live as we did.

History teaches everything, even the future.

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.

Our task is not to fix blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.

Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.

The present is burthened too much with the past.

Don't let the doom criers and the cynics persuade you that the best is past.

human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

There's a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They'd rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.