Howard Zinn Quotes

If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.

Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

Unless you understand the history of a situation, you can't ever hope to solve problems.

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.

When I say history is a matter of life and death, I mean this: If you really don't know history, you are a victim of whatever the authorities tell you. You have no way of checking up on them. You have no way of deciding whether there is any truth in what they are saying.

Those who do not know history are probably also not doing well in English or math. P.J. O'Rourke

He stared at his feet. “I’m still very ignorant,” he said, “but at least I’m ignorant about really important things.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

There's just a whole different attitude and vibe when you're not in power as when you're in power.

One has to learn from history. Quite frankly, it is almost impossible to have a sense of vision without a sense of history. If history is learned, then it doesn't have to repeat itself over generations.

Obedience to public authority ought not to be based either on ignorance or stupidity.

Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.

But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

I'm not an educated man. I only know what I'm told, and I'm not told that much; I have no frame of reference for how to place things in history be a responsible leader. All I can do is be an artist.

I think it is terribly important to have opinions, and to think. We live in a world of action without thought.

History is our guide, and without a knowledge of history, we are lost!

Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

I didn't realise how important stupid people are in your life, because you ask yourself, what made stupid people so stupid? What made them the way they are?

The past is important for all the information and wisdom it holds. But you can get lost in it. You've got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present.