Quotes on History

George Bernard Shaw:
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

George Bernard Shaw:
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Santayana:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

George Wilhelm Hegel:
What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.

Gerda Lerner:
We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Karl Marx:
It is not "history" which uses men as a means of achieving -- as if it were an individual person -- its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Kurt Vonnegut:
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Mark Twain:
To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Oscar Wilde:
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Pearl S. Buck:
One faces the future with one's past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

Winston Churchill:
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.