Quotes & Sayings About Learning Lessons From History

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult. — Nicolas Bentley

If I have nothing but a room full of books, it is enough for me to survive life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Everything has happened before - not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called "the lessons of history," but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse. — Elizabeth Peters

Will this generation be able to turn things around and learn a valuable lesson from all of this? I hope so, but I have my doubts. The damage has been done. And as a lifelong student of history, it's quite evident that human beings don't learn from the mistakes of past generations. — Aaron B. Powell

I'm a great reader of history. I love - I have been reading history since I was a kid, and learning the lessons globally of what happened with people. — Warren Mundine

To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Still men be clever and in an hundred centuries or more, perchance will have found a way to journey thither; when that they have discovered and understood all things on the earth. What will a man be like in the xxvii century, or even the xx? Very like unto us, I do expect; I do not think that man's nature shall change; nor do I anticipate that he will be the wiser than we, for all his learning, for 'tis a part of that nature which is ours that we do not heed the lessons of history: neither our own, nor the world's. — Chico Kidd

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins. — Robert A. Heinlein

produced a race of heroes, so not less surely did the growth of luxury and absolutism, assisted by the narrow-mindedness of a dynasty of bigots, lose for Portugal the lofty place which her heroes had won for her. These are things well worth pondering upon and lessons well worth learning, for the great value of the study of history is in teaching such truths as these - truths which are eternal, while nations wax and wane. The — H. Morse Stephens

You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom. — Stella Adler

There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that. — Tom Lichtenberg