Past Analysis Quotes

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

Doing history with integrity requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors.

You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it.

The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present.

The absence of romance from my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future

while the modern historical school of economists appear to be only exploring the monuments of the past, they are really shaking the foundations of many of our institutions in the present.

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.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

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

You could arm-chair quarterback what the president did or didn't do, or was asked to do or asked not to do. I guess I'm more focused on what's going forward.

Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

Sometimes I watch past goals, but I don't watch them because I think that it'll help me to score in the next game.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.