Why Do We Learn History Quotes & Sayings

We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility of the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be continuously forming. They are probably being put together now in the laboratory of the stars ... Can we ever learn to control the process. Why not? Only research can tell. — Robert Andrews Millikan

Rooted in the word 'history' is 'story.' And America's story is exceptional. It's amazing. Younger students should learn that we have always been and continue to be a land of immigrants - a land committed to bold new ideas. — Heidi Hayes Jacobs

The inquiry has often been made of us in the course of our history, why we do not contradict such and such statements, "Why do you not confute this or that?" "Why do you not enlighten the people in regard to certain statements which are urged against you, and disabuse the public mind?" ... As for offering refutations to charges made against us, it would be impossible to keep pace with the thousands of freshly invented falsehoods that the powers spiritual and the powers temporal would produce to feed the credulity of the ignorant masses. Bunyan says that it requires a legion of devils to watch one Christian; it would require a legion of refutations to keep pace with one infernal liar, therefore we say, "lie on, falsify every thing you want to falsify, and say what you please; there is a God in Israel, and if you have not yet learned it, you will learn it."
[JD10:105, 109] — Brigham Young

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way. — Martha Gellhorn

Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. — Arthur Conan Doyle

If we were given one word of information in our entire history, how we'd treasure it! how we'd pore over ever syllable, divining it's meaning, arguing its importance; how we'd examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet ... we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day we'll die of voluntary ignorance — Karen Traviss

Jews must learn to say without excuse, without equivocation: despite our history and our powerlessness in the past, despite allthe injustices that we have endured
today, now, the Palestinians are the victims of oppression, and their oppressors are the Israelis. — Irena Klepfisz

There never was, for all I could ever learn, a time when living was easy and peaceful. — Ellis Peters

Any book, any story, is a piece of history. Be it fiction and fable or historical fact, history is a very important part of our lives. And one thing I have learned is that history is important to us as a people, we can learn from it and we can find hope within it. We can live and laugh in ways that may not be found in our current lives and we can find solace in those times of heartache and pain. There is so much that a book can do for an individual person. That is why if there is but a single person willing to lose themselves to that history that we hold in our own hearts, than it is up to us as authors to make it available to them. — A.W.Chrystalis

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost. — Robert Penn Warren

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

Humanity suffers terribly from the demons it has created over lengths of time.
we learn from nothing that we do. we create religions, heritage, race, traditions, then they all in turn become our stumbling blocks from becoming one. we suffer from the creations of our own inability to interpret history. the only thing we have succeded on is seperation.we are not that different from one another as we think we are. but we are too corrupted to break our deconstruction. — Jeffrey Fischer

When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree. (...) And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about. — Peter S. Beagle

Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away, history will teach us nothing. — Sting

The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. — Sarah Vowell

In the end, we learn about the most basic philosophical questions - like "How to live?" - from a broad mixture of sources, including literature and philosophy, history and anthropology. These sources can guide our reflections on our own experiences, as we explore and reconsider. Mann contributed to such explorations in a distinctive way, and I hope my book brings that out. — Philip Kitcher

The military ain't there for the people's protection,
They're just there to protect an investment.
That's why people get arrested, electrocuted, molested,
Connected streets are infested with those tired of protesting.
Traumatized children grown in guerrilla garrisons,
9/11 generations pale in comparison.
And you will learn a lesson repeated through history:
That no matter what you think, occupation is not victory. — Immortal Technique