Quotes About History

Scientists may be in the business of laughing at their predecessors, but owing to an array of human mental dispositions, few realize that someone will laugh at their beliefs in the (disappointingly near) future.

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.

In a thick and captivating book, La rebellion française, the historian Jean Nicolas shows how the culture of rioting was extremely sophisticated—historically, it counts as the true French national sport.

In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.

What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly

We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.

It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.

But bankers used to be subjected to Hammurabi's rule. The tradition in Catalonia was to behead bankers in front of their own banks

The "persecution" of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare.

Our problem is not just that we do not know the future, we do not know much of the past either. We

While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so?

Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

Until recent history, the central state represented about 5 percent of the economy. ...and further, governments were sufficiently distracted by war to leave economic affairs to businessmen. The contagious creation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century led to what we saw with the two world wars and their sequels.

They game the system while citizens pay the price. At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.

Problema noastr? nu este numai c? nu cunoa?tem viitorul, ci ?i c? nu cunoa?tem nici trecutul.

The more we try to turn history into anything other than an enumeration of accounts to be enjoyed with minimal theorizing, the more we get into trouble. Are we so plagued with the narrative fallacy?†

Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things.

When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.