Dar Williams Quotes

The best prophet of the future is the past.

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.

Historically, foreign powers have always been the ones to keep Latin nations divided.

If we compare the present time with former ages, we find that the same tendencies and desires have at all times governed states and peoples.

A few years in the age of nations is nothing.

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.

It is when empires begin to fall, that they tend to cause the most mayhem.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

History is not a blueprint for present practice.

Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more.

Studying the past may suggest new ways of going wrong.

Having lived in a collapsed empire before - I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed - you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that's on its way out.

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

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

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

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

I’ve been listening to how the Roman Empire fell and all I can say is, it didn’t fall nearly fast enough!”-Iggy

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.

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

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

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

You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out.