Len Deighton Quotes

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

History repeats itself because no one listens the first time.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

History should teach humility and prudence, but America doesn’t seem to learn. I’ve never seen a virgin who loses her innocence more often.

It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system. -- With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature [us] will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

Most of us readily take things for granted that at an earlier time remained to be discovered.

No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.

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

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

We don’t usually know how to see beyond our presuppositions (the reason, of course, why so many false views of indubitable past geniuses seem so strange to us today.)

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

Stupidity is much the same all the world over.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

Each century believes its fight to be weightier than that of all others preceding it.

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

It is the habit of mankind to mistake familiarity for accurate knowledge.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight...

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

It is men of science who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which as the earthly wants and passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark in history.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.