Norman Cousins Quotes

History is the best guide to the future.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

I can't change history but only learn from it.

I like history because you can't really progress without knowing what comes before you, so I think it's super fascinating.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

History is only a feeble light, for the rubrics were meant to answer future problems unimagined and unimaginable

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

We are products of the past and its useful to remember that as we move into the future.

History turns in one direction only, and you can't get it back. You can only draw conclusions.

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

The careful study of the past enlarges our foresight in contemporary affairs and affords to citizens and to monarchs lessons of incitement or warning in the ordering of public policy

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times.

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

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history.

Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

You cannot alter the past. You can only learn from it, and … history is the best teacher.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.

The context of history proved invaluable.