Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

I hope my journals relating to World War II will help clarify issues of the past and thereby contribute to understanding the issues and conditions of the present and future.

Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.

History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

History is clarified experience.

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.

There is no beginning that is a blank page.

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.

History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.