Past Repeats Itself Quotes

The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

I've been in love and it doesn't last. And when it's over, it's hell for a while. And then one discovers that life goes on. Eventually, one falls in love again. This pattern repeats itself until one is too jaded to believe in it anymore, or too old for all the upheaval. ~ Laura Lee Guhrke

You mustn't expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn't interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things. ~ Pablo Picasso

Art, when destroyed can never be replaced, yet history repeats itself. ~ Clarence H. Burns

History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the week from the will of the strong, and the 'mutant' from being annihilated by the 'normal'. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I believe history is a circle, made by men who don't learn from their mistakes. ~ Edward Hogan

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. ~ Joseph Conrad

I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn't see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that's inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others.
I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. ~ Trevor Noah

Scientists say that somewhere in the universe, every event under the sun repeats itself an infinite number of times in every possible variation. ~ Romina Russell

Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself. ~ Ba Jin

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. ~ Julian Barnes

History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done. ~ Sydney J. Harris

What's the story here, Karl?' Kevin asked.
'Hard as it is to believe, these people are slaves,' Karl explained.
'Slaves?' I asked skeptically.
'Well, you might not call them that but they are virtual slaves. They don't receive any pay. They are dealt with harshly. They don't have anywhere else to go'
'What about the government? Don't they help?' Marcus asked.
'The government?' Karl laughed. 'The government my eye! Those generals stay in power several years, make a bundle smuggling drugs, and once they're millionaires, they retire. Some other lousy generals take over from them, and history repeats itself. You think they give a shit what happens to a few lousy Indians? ~ Yossi Ghinsberg

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history. ~ Clarence Darrow

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context. ~ Ben Lerner

Like the seasons of the year, like history, truth also repeats itself. But we seldom recognize it when great poets or true artists - the prophets and the priests of our day - present it to us in garments spick and span, following the fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind. ~ Ameen Rihani

I have said this in the past and I will continue to repeat it as long as I live: Whoever tries to hurt our national unity is my enemy until the day of judgement. ~ King Hussein I

The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. ~ Lu Xun

The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only ~ Mark Fisher

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There's no way out.
–
You'll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight. ~ Alexandr Blok

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance - not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. ~ Jane Jacobs

Nature is infinite innovation and beauty that never repeats itself. Only man-made artifacts are endlessly repetitious, which is a principal reason our lives are so boring, full of anxiety and devoid of meaning. ~ Dee Hock

Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over. ~ Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another s soul. ~ James Joyce

The mind loves whatever repeats a pleasurable experience from the past. "I love this" basically means "I love repeating what felt so good before". ~ Deepak Chopra

Art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception. ~ Dore Ashton

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself. ~ George Eliot

Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision? ~ Frank Herbert

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history. ~ Eugene Jarecki

The example given by the Nazi regime as to the ability of a modern state to destroy human lives with the same techniques used by modern industry, employing the bureaucratic apparatus readily available to any modern state, is one that can hardly be ignored. Because although history may not repeat itself, it is rare that anything introduced to human history is not used again. Whether the Holocaust was unique or not in terms of its precedents is one question; whether it will remain so is quite another. ~ Omer Bartov

Grimm: Cat and Mouse (#1.18) (2012)
Edgar Waltz: You may think I'm a monster, but what I am is necessary. No society would survive without order. Free thought is not free. There's no such thing as revolution. The oppressed always become the oppressors and the cycle repeats itself over and over. The only way to win is to stay out of the cycle. You don't understand a word that I've been saying.
Rosalee Calvert: I'm sorry. I wasn't listening. ~ Jacob Grimm

Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

History repeats itself, you sang. I wonder if that's true. If there's a hurt
that's buried in us, maybe it keeps fi nding its way through. ~ Ava Dellaira

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it. ~ Steve Berry

You, right this minute, stand at the growing tip of evolution. The next thing you think, the next action you take, will either create a new possibility for you, or it will repeat the past. ~ Anonymous

Dance is an image. As painting is a song. Simulacra simulate. A rite repeats a metaphora (a voyage). Moving trucks in modern-day Greece still have the word METAPHORA on their sides. A myth is the danced image of the rite itself, which is expected to attract the world. ~ Pascal Quignard

Nature repeats itself, but it never starts from the beginning. ~ Nicolas Roeg