Interpreting the Past Quotes

There's an arrogance of assuming that we can interpret the past - that we've left the right footnotes, that we're doing the right reclamation projects, that we're not overcorrecting. Actually, we have no idea where we're going. It's this Tower of Babel type scenario.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.

History is Philosophy teaching by example.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

History is philosophy teaching by examples.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.