Russell Hoban Quotes

The past has to inform the present.

Being in London has really taught me how important history is. Just having information of the past. It helps you predict the future, which is all we really have as, you know, humans.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.

I am told that there is a proverbial phrase among the Inuit: 'A long time ago, in the future.' Let the children see our history, and maybe it will help to shape the future.

The study of history empowers nations and individuals with an ability to avoid errors of the past and lay foundations for victories in the future.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

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.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

Malcolm was a firm believer in the value and importance of our heritage. He believed that we have valuable and distinct cultural traditions which need to be institutionalized so that they can be passed on to our heirs.

We know the past and its great events, the present in its multitudinous complications, chiefly through faith in the testimony of others.

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

Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

It is not well to go into things long past, unless to learn something for our present guidance.

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

lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience.

The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world …. our proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

There can be no dedication to Canada's future without a knowledge of its past.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.