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Learning from History

Learning from History. Javier Ergueta September, 2010. “ Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it ” Lord Acton. “ In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. ”

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Learning from History

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  1. Learning from History Javier Ergueta September, 2010

  2. “Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it” • Lord Acton

  3. “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

  4. “History teaches everything including the future.” • Alphonse de Lamartine

  5. “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

  6. “History…teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical. • Marc Bloch

  7. “We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened.” • T. F. Tout

  8. "Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.” –Goethe

  9. “The patterns said to be found in past events are selected by the historian; like the hypotheses of the scientist, they may be suggested, but are neither imposed nor dictated, by "the facts".” • Reuben Abel

  10. “We learn from history that we never learn anything from history.” • G. F. W. Hegel

  11. “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” • Abba Eban

  12. “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” • Karl Marx

  13. “If History teaches any lesson at all, it is that there are no historical lessons.” • Lucien Febvre

  14. “History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.” • Paul Valery

  15. “It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.” • C. G. Jung

  16. “We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.” • Reinhold Niebuhr

  17. “The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” • James Bryce

  18. “History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.” • James Harvey Robinson

  19. “History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.” • Ken Burns

  20. “History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.” • Etienne Gilson

  21. “History belongs above all to the man…who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.” • Friedrich Nietzsche

  22. “All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology.” • G. B. Caird

  23. To public debates on the lessons of history, historians should bring our discipline's traditional virtues: a strict adherence to research methods that are public, transparent, and open to critical scrutiny; a commitment to examining as much of the relevant evidence as possible, even if it threatens our own interpretation; a critical approach to all sources, and especially those that seem to confirm conventional wisdom; the struggle to overcome personal bias, a struggle that should be no less persistent because it is unavoidably imperfect; and, last but not least, the resolute refusal to believe something merely because we wish it to be true. I can think of nothing more politically useful and practically important than these habits of mind. • James Sheehan

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