Barbara Ramsey Quotes

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

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

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

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.

No single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

To discover the various use of things is the work of history.

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.