Historical Ignorance Quotes

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

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.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

You take a 30-year-old. To him, history began the day he was born. He doesn't know how cold it was 70 years ago unless he's told. He doesn't care. He thinks what's happening now is either the best or the worst, whatever it is, ever. Everybody thinks that.

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.

Some say, 'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.' I say, 'Those who ignore history are in for a big surprise.'

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

Heaven’s Yes. I was hopelessly naïve regarding Joseph Stalin. I thought he just drove too hard.

The lessons of history teach us - if the lessons of history teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

Instead of recognizing the State as ‘the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,’ the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will.

One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wrestle with dominance and cruelty.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

One of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793.

I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another.

I think many Dutch just don't know the history of Black Pete, that he is rooted in slavery, and how he was used to dehumanize a race of people. Once they realize this, many stop using this character, but those who continue are either in denial, insensitive or actually racists.

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.