It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
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.
Some say, 'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.' I say, 'Those who ignore history are in for a big surprise.'
Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
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.
Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.
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.
Even if we remember the past, odds are good we'll still repeat it.
History repeats itself and that's just how it goes.
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
I felt that the world, and in particular this country, were going in circles. What had happened 40 or 50 years ago was happening again, but even in a worse form - that we were sinking into a lot of ignorance and a lot of superficial change.
Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.
Unless we learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. This is no longer merely an academic exercise, but may contain our worlds fate and our destiny.
We're making the same mistakes we made 1,000 years ago. So they must be the right ones. So relax.
Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.
Maybe if people started to listen, history would stop repeating itself.
That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.
The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war, some lessons were learned. There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Or Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again." Human nature always superimposes itself - its strength and its frailty over the rush of chaos of ongoing events - and we can perceive patterns and themes and motifs.
Remember the lessons of history - if we don't learn from history, we're bound to repeat it.
I think there's nothing more dangerous than mislearning lessons of history, and we do it perpetually.
Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
So I left him there alone to watch history repeat the same events retold again and again on his own.
