Quotes & Sayings About Ignoring History

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw. — Sarah Manguso

I've learned that history is the autobiography of the historian, that ignoring the past is the act of a fool, and that loyalty does not mean falling into line, but stepping out of it for the people you love. — Annie Barrows

Throughout evolutionary history, anxiety and fear have helped every species to be wary and to survive. Fear can signal us to act, or, alternatively, to resist the impulse to act. It can help us to make wise, self-protective choices in and out of relationships where we might otherwise sail mindlessly along, ignoring signs of trouble. — Harriet Lerner

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way. — B.W. Powe

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time. — Alice Miller

If you turn a blind eye to the world now, history will turn a blind eye to you later. Ignoring an issue makes you a tacit supporter of it. — Stewart Stafford

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history. — Norman Borlaug

The West responded to the civil war by simply ignoring it, and after the 2001 invasion the years from 1992 to 1996 were all but stricken from the standard narrative. It was dangerous history, the truths buried within it too uncomfortable and "messy. If the mujahedeen had been no better than the Taliban or al-Qaeda, any attempt to bring the principal actors of that period to account could only lead to the highest echelons of Hamid Karzai's government, and, by extension, to American policy over the previous thirty years. — Anand Gopal

There is no doubt of the essential nobility of that man who pours into life the honest vigor of his toil, over those who compose the feathery foam of fashion that sweeps along Broadway; who consider the insignia of honor to consist in wealth and indolence; and who, ignoring the family history, paint coats of arms to cover up the leather aprons of their grandfathers. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like. — Joseph Sobran

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all. — Aldo Leopold

We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power. — Dick Cheney

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

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether. — Jim Butcher

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore
one that's only there as a mnemonic, a placeholder, for the people who give the machines their orders. A REM line might say something like "this bit is a self-contained sub loop" or "Steve Perlman in Marketing is a shit." The program as a whole rolls on past and around the REM lines, ignores them completely as it takes its shape, moves through its pre-ordained sequences, unfolds its wonders. My mother named me well. — Louise Carey

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today - it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence. — Roy Scranton

VOTE!!! Remember what the suffragists said when they finally won their long hard battle to get us the right to vote, knowing that they probably would never get to exercise the right or see the results; they said, 'this is not for ourselves alone.' It was for us and every generation of women to come. If we don't vote, we are ignoring history and giving away the future. — Pat Mitchell

People forget history nowadays,that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one had lived. — Aporva Kala

Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word - to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere. — William Sloane Coffin

The hardest task for the historian ... is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we're looking for while ignoring anything contrary to our expectations. So history, because it is a human pursuit, is always partial and prejudiced no less than our own interior lives: both are just a sum of contingent memories. — Christopher Evans

For the first time in history, men and women are seriously exploring the possibilities of relationships based on separateness rather than togetherness. Instead of clinging to Yahweh, to a rigid set of laws established by a jealous Father-God who will rant in fury if he is disobeyed, they are simply ignoring that ranting, walking away from it, and attempting to put their trust in the irrational. In other words, they are trying to live by the spirit. — Marion Woodman

People forget history nowadays, he lamented, that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one has lived. — Aporva Kala

There are hundreds of reasons for Daniel and me
to be impossible. History has not been kind
to two boys who love each other like we do.
But putting that aside. And not even considering
the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago,
his family was in a small town in Russia
and my family was in a similarly small town
in Ireland- I can't imagine they could have
imagined us here, together. Forgetting our gender,
ignoring all the strange roads that led to us
being in the same time and place, there is still
the simple impossibility of love. That all of our
contradicting securities and insecurities,
interests and disinterests, beliefs and doubts,
could somehow translate into this common
uncommon affection should be as impossible
as walking to the moon. But instead, I love him. — David Levithan