Understanding the Past Quotes

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

A man who has no sense of history is like a man who has no ears or no eyes.

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.

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.

Can't disagree with the need for a grasp of history.

By living deeply in the present moment we can understand the past better & prepare for a better future.

The historian is a prophet looking bzckwards.

[talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

To remain ignorant of history is to remain forever a child

History is the present day consideration of what went before.

Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

Art is made in hindsight.

I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of -- a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of -- the history of the world of the past.

My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world.

One thing I do find in the "lost" generation or something is a kind of abhorrence of history, you know, like it's boring, dumb, or just not interesting. I think it's terribly interesting if you can get your head around how it relates to where you're standing right here and now.