Living
without a knowledge of history is like painting without vision.
You cannot
hope to understand all there is to see. -- George
Young
 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 (1832)
There is a history in all
men's lives. -- Shakespeare - King Henry IV part
III.
Let us make
haste to write down the stories and traditions of the people before they
are forgotten. -- Henri-Raymond
Casgrain (1861-65)
Histories
make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy
deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. -- Francis
Bacon
It ought to
go without saying, of course, that the historian's truth is only partial
truth: real truth is laid up in the mind of God. But even partial
truth has value in a chaotic and bewildering world. Men need not be
ignorant and helpless victims of the historical process. History can
help men to understand their nation's distinctive character, and to
recognize the main direction of its advance in time. -- Donald
Creighton (1971).
Indeed,
history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes. --
Voltaire (1767)
History does
not repeat itself; historians do. -- James
M. Minifie (1976)
Human history becomes more and
more a race between education and catastrophe. -- H.G.
Wells (1951)
 I
have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by
preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution,
and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost
reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an
old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is
depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from
it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had
formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is
perennial and yet the human race has survived. -- Bertrand
Russell (1943)
Just as
memory validates personal identity, history perpetuates collective
self-awareness. . . . Indeed, the enterprise of history is crucial to
social preservation. -- David
Lowenthal (1985) |
