Nicolas Bentley Quotes

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

I think you can learn from history.

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

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

An accurate knowledge of the past of a country is necessary for everyone who would understand its present, and who desires to judge of its future.

A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.

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

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

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

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

History is not a blueprint for present practice.

I write to learn the flow of history.

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.