What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.
The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.
One does not know completely a science as long as one does not know its history.
The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities—perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
When the history of our times is written, will we be remembered as the generation that turned our backs in a moment of global crisis or will it be recorded that we did the right thing?
No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.
History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
Man is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history; nor is he entirely innocent, since he continues it.
History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
What history relates is only the long, heavy, confused dream of humanity.
The separation of history from geography rests upon the separation of time from space.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
The history of the world is the world's court of justice.
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
History should be written as philosophy.
Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.
