Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes

I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads.

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.

We must teach our people the greatness of China's historical culture. In our educational program we must stress Chinese history and geography so that all may know and appreciate China's civilization of five thousand years and the far-flung boundaries of our ancient race. This will engender a greater faith in our own future.

Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.

It is only education and understanding of the past that teaches us not to repeat history.

School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.

If you're not critical about your history, that can be a problem because there are religious leaders, politicians and all kinds of powerful people who can take advantage of a population that isn't really thinking.

I was always deeply aware that I was living in history.

My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.

Those of our people who do not study history can be duped into believing anything.

The study of history is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.