Best 16 quotes in «history repeats itself quotes» category

Men make their own history

It was interesting looking back at the '80s and trying to find newspaper headlines from the time - the cliché of history repeating itself.

Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Silence ensures that history repeats itself.

[N]ot only is the most marvellous event in this book collaborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages.

But it is dangerous to follow Examples, if they do not correspond in the most material Circumstances with the present State of our Affairs; are not conducted with equal Judgment, or attended with the like Prospect of Success.

For us to change history, we first need to change the future.

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived. Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.

I believe history is a circle, made by men who don't learn from their mistakes.

Now a regular occurrence in the eighteenth century repeats itself: the aristocracy accepts the viewpoint and standards of value of the middle class; virtue becomes a fashion in the upper class.

Art, when destroyed can never be replaced, yet history repeats itself.

The footsteps of Western Civilization are currently hobbled by a serious case of fallen arches.

History repeats itself and History never repeats itself are about equally true.

History repeats itself and that's just how it goes.

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.

History repeats itself over and over again, but most of us have short memories.