Learning From History Quotes

[I]f one is to learn from history, one should not concentrate solely upon a single portion of an era but rather make a thorough investigation of the many complex and mutually contradictory factors that made the era what it was. One must take the single portion and fit it into its proper place. One must evaluate the various elements that went into giving it its special character. Thus one must look at history from a perspective that offers a broad and balanced view.
This, I believe, is what is meant by learning from history. For any man's view of his own era is limited, and he has great difficulty in trying to obtain a comprehensive picture of his time. Precisely because of this, then, the comprehensive picture offered by history both provides information and constitutes a pattern for one's guidance. A man who lives bound by the limits of the minute-to-minute present is able, by means of the broad vision offered by time-transcending history, to avail himself of a comprehensive picture of his world and so correct his own narrow view of things. Such is the enjoyable privilege that history offers men.
Learning from history should never mean fastening upon a particular aspect of a particular era and using it as a model to reform a particular aspect of the present. To take out of the jigsaw puzzle of the past a piece with a set form and attempt to fit it into the present is not an enterprise that could have a happy outcome. To do so is to toy with history, a pastime fit ~ Yukio Mishima

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history
whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline. ~ Barack Obama

Ignoring the evils of our history will only cause them to reoccur. ~ R.M. Donaldson

You've got to be able to take a hit and learn from it and get back up on your bike again, or get back doing whatever you do, and try even harder next time. It's all about learning from your mistakes and using it the next time so you don't put yourself in the same situation. ~ Magnus Backstedt

What if, for once in history, a woman's story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves? ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

To be American is to be part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. Although America is a romantic project in which a paradise, a land of dreams, is fanned and fueled with a religion of vast possibility, it is, more fundamentally, a fragile experiment-precious yet precarious-of dialogical and democratic human endeavor that yields forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history. From Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Muhammad, Geronimo to Dorothy Day, Jane Adams to Nathaniel West, it holds out the possibility of self-transformation and self-reliance to New World dwellers willing to start anew and recast themselves for the purpose of deliverance and betterment. This purpose requires only a restlessness, energy and boldness that galvanizes people to organize and mobilize themselves in a way that makes new opportunities and possibilities credible and worth the ~ Cornel West

A man's weakest spots are almost always closest to his passions. ~ Auliq Ice

The student of Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he once experienced. By learning Torah, man returns to his own self. ~ Joseph B. Soloveitchik

History reveals that groups of human beings are capable of systematically killing members of other human groups. Humans have killed other humans: six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, and over 110,000 Japanese, the latter within a matter of seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John Hodge (1975) estimates that 150 million lives were lost in the slave trade of blacks from Africa. More than 5,000 blacks were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1939. Just as a child who witnesses her mother being battered by her father feels physically threatened, women who witness male-male violence also feel physically threatened. The observation of violence among others creates fear of physical violence and thus constitutes emotional violence. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise. ~ Aldo Leopold

Temptation is as old as time; or at least, the history of temptation extends as far back as the moment Eve gave Adam that serpent's apple. But what sets the lady apart from the tramp is the ability to acknowledge she needs to clean up her act - and then, of course, the fact that she actually does clean up her act. ~ Derek Blasberg

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it. ~ W.G. Sebald

He who remembers from day to day what he has yet to learn, and from month to month what he has learned already, may be said to have a love of learning. ~ Confucius

She won't rat out on us. Let me talk to her, and she'll see reason."
"I'd give her some time before you attempt it," came the wry answer.
"She usually doesn't stay mad long," Bran said carelessly.
Again habit urged me to move. I knew to stay made me a spy-ears, which no one over the age of four is excused in being, yet I didn't move. I couldn't move. So I stood there and listened--and thus proved the old proverb about eavesdroppers getting what they deserve.
Shevraeth said, "I'm very much afraid it's my fault. We met under the worst of circumstances, and we seem to have misunderstood one another to a lethal degree."
Bran said, "No, if it's anyone's fault, it's ours--my parents' and mine. You have to realize our mother saw Tlanth as a haven from her Court life. All she had to do was potter around her garden and play her harp. I don't think Mel even knows Mother spent a few years at Erev-li-Erval, learning Kheras in the Court of the Empress. Mel scarcely talked before she started hearing stories on the immoral, rotten, lying Court decorations. Mama liked seeing her running wild with Oria and the village brats. Then Mama was killed, and Papa mostly lived shut in his tower, brooding over the past. He didn't seem to know what to do with Mel. She couldn't read or write, wouldn't even sit still indoors--all summer she would disappear for a week at a time, roaming in the hills. I think she knows more about the ways of the Hill Folk than she does about what ac ~ Sherwood Smith

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned. ~ Karl Marx

Like sisters everywhere. With personalities shaped by birth order, we are the keepers of each other's secrets and protectors of each other's childhood memories. We are givers and receivers of female wisdom and are constantly learning from each other. ~ Debra Ginsberg

Data from ice core samples taken from glaciers and ice caps have allowed scientists to provide fairly precise global average temperature estimates going back several hundred thousand years. These data show that the stability of Earth's climate over the past 10,000 years is highly atypical. Most of human and hominid history over the past two million years is punctuated by sharp swings in climate and by more than twenty ice ages. In mere decades, average temperature sometimes changed by half the difference between today's conditions and an ice age, with some continental shelf coastlines invading by miles.32 ~ Jim Rubens

It was a skill useful to lawyers, and no man in all English history was more the lawyer than Coke. He personified a profession considered both so influential and so dubious that in 1372 the House of Commons had tried to bar lawyers from Parliament; little had changed when, in Coke's lifetime, Shakespeare wrote, "First, kill all the lawyers. ~ John M Barry

The notion that the mind and body are actually different sides of the same coin goes all the way back to the origins of medicine. For most of its history, the practice was not separated from other aspects of human activity. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

Good design should reflect a sense of human history-some aspect of where we've come from. ~ Hartmut Esslinger

If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it. ~ Wayne Thiebaud

When we have the disease to please, the word, "Yes" can taste of resentment. We need to take care of ourselves, first, so we can give from a place of abundance. When we give ourselves away to everyone else, first, we having nothing left, with which, to nourish ourselves. This can lead to feelings of bitterness and resentment. Giving to others should be a joyous and enriching experience. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

Discoveries from one community cannot be repackaged and provided to another as a silver bullet, That's a "best practice" rollout and it invariably evokes the immune rejection response. ~ Richard Pascale

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves. ~ Philipp Meyer

We're finally becoming aware of a process that has been unconscious since human experience began. From the start, humans have perceived a Birth Vision, and then after birth have gone unconscious, aware of only the vaguest of intuitions. At first in the early day of human history, the distance between what we intended and what we actually accomplished was very great, and then, over time, the distance has closed. Now we're the verge of remembering everything. ~ James Redfield

There are no mistakes in life! ~ Oprah Winfrey

Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially. ~ Bill McKibben

(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors ... ~ Stefan Zweig

Meditation is not a process of learning how to meditate; it is the very inquiry into what is meditation. To inquire into what is meditation, the mind must free itself from what it has learnt about meditation, and the freeing of the mind from what it has learnt is the beginning of meditation. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ~ Publishers Weekly

Wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity. ~ Llewellyn Rockwell

We must eliminate the gulf of mistrust and ignorance that keeps us from learning from each other. ~ Coretta Scott King

Whatever happened in those more than one hundred years, from the time my great-great-great grandfather studied law to the time when my own father took his bar exam in 1989, I may never know. Perhaps it was just greed and the good, old-fashion corruption that comes with power. The Drexlers have moved from the fight for human rights to the fight for corporations and wealthy individuals. We file their taxes, write their contracts, clean up their messes. As I see it, we have become little more than glorified Public Relations reps ~ Gwenn Wright

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. ~ Karl Marx

But the story of leukemia
the story of cancer
isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship
qualities often ascribed to great physicians
are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

...I find it hard not to think of our home as a chrysalis from which the butterfly has flown. I miss my daughter. The rug bristles with the absence of her dancing feet. The windows glint with the history of her looking. Water rings on the sills recall where her teacup should be. The air lacks a sweet buzz. ~ Scott Russell Sanders

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333) ~ Don DeLillo

Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current. ~ Meredith Hall

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and
try again in a different way. ~ Dale Carnegie

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy. ~ Tobsha Learner

We [Americans] have a historical trauma when it comes to the past relationships when it comes to Native Americans and the history of how America was created. With this film, it's nice to see that the trauma is presented from a white male that was in the Civil War and that trauma affects him in a way that still exists. ~ Adam Beach

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit. ~ Lewis Carroll

There is always much to be learned from bad times, and to many people who prosper, they get good lessons from bad times inorder to find the way out. ~ Auliq Ice

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost - a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sendingMark Strand

Poetry