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Learning from History
Famous quotations and quotes


This selection of famous quotations and quotes about ' learning from history ' begins with a few quotes in which several persons express some disillusionment about Humanity actually learning from history.

The selection soon continues with other quotations where such seriously famous observers as Edmund Burke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Machiavelli present views that very directly suggest that learning deep lessons from history is both possible and desireable.



"What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
G. W. F. Hegel



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



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



"In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind."
Edmund Burke



"History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."
R. G. Collingwood



"Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature."
David Hume


You can find key insights, (from the Great Faiths, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, and Shakespeare!!!), on some of our pages that give convincing support to this view of General Human Nature!!!


"...man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world..."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Introductory quotations
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"Central" mysticism insights
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"Other" spiritual wisdom
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"Central" poetry insights
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"Other" poetry wisdom
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Spirituality & the wider world


"Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment."
Immanuel Kant
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Or to quote Emerson, from his famous Essay ~ History more fully:-

"In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world."


"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results."
Machiavelli


"History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future."
Robert Penn Warren


"Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Please recommend this page to any of your friends who might be interested!!!

 

 
  
We have prepared some fairly meaty, but hopefully entertaining, pages about a most informative episode in European History in the spirit of making an attempt at learning worthwhile lessons from history!!!
 

  The European Revolutions of 1848


 


 


 

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