Thabo Mbeki Quotes

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

History is totally unpredictable.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

History is a dubious guide to current politics.

Historians emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated ... Few principles apply all the time.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

It's great to have a great past and history. But it's even greater to have a good future. So the most important history is the history we make today.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

We will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

What I've done in the past is history and what I'm gonna do in the future is a mystery

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead.

The past is made out of facts...I guess the future is just hope.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

I would say that in 2000, we understand as much about how today's system of globalization is going to work as we understood about how the Cold War system was going to work in 1946.