History Matters

Key quotes on the importance of history:

We all live in history. We are in the present, coming out of the past, and moving toward the future. The Christian especially believes that history is important, as is the study of history. Refusing to know about our past only ensures that its many mistakes are made over and over again.

And tyrants know that a good way to control a population is to rob them of their past – to rob them of memory. Thus they work hard at ensuring that history is discredited or revised. A dumbed-down people with little knowledge of the past are easily driven sheep.

The quotes found here speak to these realities – and more. All up 45 quotes by 30 different thinkers are featured. Enjoy.

“A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” William F. Buckley, Jr.

“Although God cannot alter the past, historians can.” Samuel Butler

“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Thomas Carlyle

“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living. Without some such contrast or comparison, without some such shifting of the point of view, we should see nothing whatever of our own social surroundings. We should take them for granted, as the only possible social surroundings. We should be as unconscious of them as we are, for the most part, of the hair growing on our heads or the air passing through our lungs. It is the variety of the human story that brings out sharply the last turn that the road has taken, and it is the view under the arch of the gateway which tells us that we are entering a town. Yet this sense of the past is curiously patchy among the most intelligent and instructed people, especially in modern England…” G. K. Chesterton

“The greatest advances in human civilization have come when we recovered what we had lost: when we learned the lessons of History.” Winston Churchill

“The further backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” Winston Churchill

“A nation that forgets its past has no future.” Winston Churchill

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Winston Churchill

“Study the past if you would define the future.” Confucius

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” Michael Crichton

“The object of such [revisionist] historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture. Indeed, the underlying theme uniting the two great dystopias of the twentieth century [Huxley’s and Orwell’s] is the need to preserve a sense of history and cultural tradition if life is to be bearable…. In both dystopias (of Orwell and Huxley), people find themselves cut off from the past as a matter of deliberate policy. The revolution that brought about the Brave New World, says Mustapha Mond, was ‘accompanied by a campaign against the Past’ – the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (as in the Taliban’s Afghanistan), the banning of old books. In 1984 ‘the past has been abolished.’ ‘History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right’.” Theodore Dalrymple

“As Stalin rewrote history in the 1930s, the Soviet joke went that ‘the past changes so often you don’t know what’s going to happen yesterday’.” Mike Doran

“So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.” Will Durant

“Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mould a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes and fears… There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” Will Durant

“History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Edward Gibbon

“In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren’t absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.” Victor Davis Hanson

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
Aldous Huxley

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” Paul Johnson

“We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present.” Russell Kirk

“Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.” Russell Kirk

“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.” C. S. Lewis

“We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.” C. S. Lewis

“[A]ll that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” C. S. Lewis

“I have learned from my mistakes. Now I can repeat them perfectly.” Groucho Marx

“The first battlefield is to rewrite history.” Karl Marx

“Take away the heritage of a people and they are easily persuaded.” Karl Marx

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” Golda Meir

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” George Orwell

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” George Orwell

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell

“What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!” Camille Paglia

“Why do I have to study history? Well, you’re a historical being. You need to know who you are and where you came from and what you stand on, why you think the things you think, what is the appropriate manner to live. Those aren’t optional questions – well they are, because you can fail to answer all of them, but then you live in a chaotic, desolate, nihilistic wasteland of anxiety and hopelessness. The alternative is to place yourself in the proper tradition. And you have to understand what proper tradition is, and part of that understanding is to start to grapple with the complexities and realities of those traditions.” Jordan Peterson

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

“Through no fault of their own, most Americans study American history in school. This is why they have so many misconceptions about American history.” Joe Sobran

“To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened’.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.” Thomas Sowell

“Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.” Thomas Sowell

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?” Thomas Sowell

“Without history, many people have no idea how many of today’s half-baked ideas have been tried, again and again—and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with re-treaded rhetoric.” Thomas Sowell

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.” Baruch Spinoza

“The history of the human race is the history of relentless resistance by human beings to the sweetness of the grace of God.” R. C. Sproul

“For all the casual slurs about ‘cultural imperialism’, British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn’t dug it up and taken care of it, we’d know hardly anything about the ancient world. What’s important about a nation’s past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen’s inheritance.” Mark Steyn

“History is little more than the story of man’s sin, and the daily newspaper a running commentary on it.” A. W. Tozer

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