John Hope Franklin Quotes

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

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

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

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

You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.

I spend a lot of time in the future, But to help the future, sometimes you got to go back to the past, and sometimes you got to stay in the present.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

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

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past

The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.

A man cannot be in the seventeenth century and the nineteenth at one and the same moment.

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

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

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

The problem in any constitutional change is the great care put to solve the problems of the past instead of grasping those of the future.

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

Our goal is to move forward, but we know that to avoid falling backward, we must be willing to look backward and to come to terms with what happened in the past.