» On (not) learning from history

Do we learn anything from history? Clearly the opportunities are abundant, but…

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.

Tallulah Bankhead . 1902-1968 . American actress and talk-show host . Tallulah: my autobiography

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, ‘Can’t you remember anything I told you?’ and lets fly with a club.

John W Campbell . 1910-1971 . American editor and writer . Analog science fiction/fact

Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.

Paul Boese . 1923-1976 . American businessman and writer [quoted, Quote: the weekly digest (1967)]

There’s a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.

Noam Chomsky . 1928- . American linguist, cognitive scientist, philosopher, and political activist . speech at the University of Colorado at Boulder (april 2003)

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . 1770-1831 . German philosopher . Lectures on the philosophy of history . trans, HB Nisbet

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce . 1882-1941 . Irish novelist and poet . Ulysses

True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.

Nelson Mandela . 1918-2013 . South African revolutionary and politician . speech (1996)

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.

Lloyd deMause . 1931- . American psychologist . The history of childhood

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana . 1863-1952 . Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist . The life of reason

History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.

Leo Tolstoy . 1828-1910 . Russian writer, philosopher and social activist

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Mark Twain . 1835-1910 American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer . A horse’s tale [misattrib, Herodotus (Twain was summarising what he took to be Herodotus’ attitude to history)]

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Gore Vidal . 1925-2012 . American essayist, novelist, playwright and public intellectual [quoted, magazine, Butt (Jonkers, 2007)]

On (not) learning from history