Quotes About History

A nation which has forgotten its past can have no future.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved.

I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by.

There are three things to leave behind; your photographs, your library, and your personal journals. These things are certainly going to be more valuable to future generations than your furniture!

All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future

Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

Takes a long time to happen so fast... To realize that your future is somebody else's past

If we want to create a different future, we must have the courage to look at the past.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

Building the future, and keeping the past alive - are one and the same thing.

I am never free of the past. I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

He who controls the past controls the future.

Future is everything that past has forgotten.

The nature of the contrapuntal experience is that every note has to have a past and a future on the horizontal plane.

If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost.

The future will soon be a thing of the past.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present - and something to give people inspiration for the future.