Mason Cooley Quotes

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

Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.

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

One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.

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

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

Fifty years ago, historians advised politicians and policy-makers. They helped chart the future of nations by helping leaders learn from past mistakes in history. But then something changed, and we began making decisions based on economic principles rather than historical ones. The results were catastrophic.

I think you can learn from history.

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history.

The context of history proved invaluable.

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

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

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

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

The easiest way of change history is to become a historian.

The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.

Everyone must learn from the past.

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.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

Knowledge of the past and an optimistic view of the present give you great opportunities.

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.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

Intellectuals ought to study the past not for the pleasure they find in so doing, but to derive lessons from it.

We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history.