43 Quotes About History Repeating Itself

Just because something happened in the past does not mean it can’t happen again. These quotes about history repeating itself demonstrate the likeliness and effects of experiencing something again for the second time.

“A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points ofits own history, is like a person with Alzheimer’s. And that can be asocial disease of a most destructive nature.”

“All I know is that history repeats itself and people are going to want to experience the world. But I know then they are going to have a better appreciation for what is here in Maine.”

“But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here.”

“Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. A mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.”

“Disregard for the past will never do us any good. Without it we cannot know truly who we are.”

“Events had been set in motion whose echo would be heard a thousand and more generations from now.”

“Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t exist. It’s the permutations that matter.”

“History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”

“History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.”

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

“History repeats itself. As do the methods used by those specializing in the elimination of leaders who unite people into a strong force for dignity, justice and self-determination.”

“History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.”

“History repeats itself. So you might wanna pay attention.”

“History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.”

“Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.”

“I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly.”

“I spend every day showing people the power of history. But history only has the power you give it.”

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

“If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.”

“If there were ever such a thing as a unique opinion, history would probably be less inclined to repeat itself.”

“Ignorance and its denial will, sad to say, lead us down the same road as it did in all past history.”

“I’m a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don’t have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.”

“It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.”

“Maybe history wouldn’t have to repeat itself if we listened once in awhile.”

“Mounting tensions in Eastern Europe send shivers down the spine. Barely a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War we seem to be sliding inexorably towards another.”

“Nowadays, a simple faulty brake light traffic stop, can get a black person killed. It’s better to fix the broken light bulb, then having to face and cooperate with a senseless police officer.”

“People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame.”

“Power writes history, not scribes.”

“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”

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

“That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended – civilizations are built up – excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.”

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

“The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself.”

“The problem with revolutions is that they always end right where they began.”

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.”

“Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels – and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels – who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.”

“Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.”

“Two categories of people can be found in the world today. There are those who make things happen and there are those who watch things happen. A spectator watch things happen while a player make things happen.”

“We just feel like history repeats itself. You ain’t never going to see nothing brand new; you’re only going to see when records are broken. And we’re here to just set records and set trends and follow the footsteps that have been shown to us.”

“We only live once and every day spent living your principles is a day at liberty. It is clear that history is on our side.”

“We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run.”

“You are not responsible for the past, but insofar as you do nothing, you are complicit in the present created by it.”

Letting the present stay the same is just one way of encouraging change so that bad things can be put behind us.