What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
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Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
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Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Let us by all means teach black history, African history, women’s history, Hispanic history, Asian history. But let us teach them as history, not as filiopietistic commemoration. The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world and the past, dispassionate analysis, judgment, and perspective, respect for divergent cultures and traditions, and unflinching protection for those unifying ideas of tolerance, democracy, and human rights that make free historical inquiry possible.
Arthur M. Schlesinger
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
George F. Kennan
All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess.
Martin Van Buren
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Heidegger, Martin
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