Cheikh Anta Diop Quotes

I think you can learn from history.

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

It's important to learn the right lessons from the past.

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

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

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

Learning from the past helps to ensure that mistakes are not repeated.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

There is nothing more dangerous than mislearning the lessons of history.

Study history. Study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

We have to learn from the past.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

The historian is looked upon as objective when he measures the past by the popular opinions of his own time, as subjective when he does not take these opinions for models. That man is thought best fitted to depict a period of the past, who is not in the least affected by that period. But only he who has a share in building up the future can grasp what the past has been, and only when transformed into a work of art can history arouse or even sustain instincts.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

Who owns history? Everyone and no one--which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.