Famous quotations and quotes about learning from history

When it comes to the possibilities of 'learning from history' there are many things we could aspire to learn. This list of famous quotations and quotes about 'learning from history' curated by the Typerse review team begins with expressing some disillusionment about humanity's all-too-frequent failure at actually learning from history or the past mistakes of history.

"We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity."

Stephen Hawking

"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone."

G. W. F. Hegel

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."

George Bernard Shaw

"We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do."

Margaret MacMillan

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

George Santayana

"Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it."

Winston Churchill

"Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged."

Abraham Lincoln (in the context of The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865)

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