lessons from the past Quotes

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

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.

The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

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

Why is history important? Without history, many people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again - and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.

History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.

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 value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight.

Treat the past as a school.

History teaches everything, even the future.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results.

If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse.

I think it is vitally important to study History. If we are going to lead Britain safely into the future, it is essential that we understand our country's historical roots. If we can learn the lessons of the past, we will be able to avoid making mistakes in 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.

To build up a future, you have to know the past.

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect.

In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction.

Retrospective analysis is not a useful guide to current problems.

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.