Jean Piaget Quotes

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.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

I think you can learn from history.

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.

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

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

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

History is Philosophy teaching by example.

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

Americans today don’t know history—even the smart ones who went to Ivy League schools.

History is philosophy teaching by examples.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

It is not only by the questions we have answered that progress may be measured, but also by those we are still asking. The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

Study history. Study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

History is the single discipline from the world of learning that most informs action in the world. So if you ask world leaders what guides them in making decisions about a new circumstance that they have just encountered it is usually implicitly “a little like this” or “a little like” something else that happened in the past. They use that much more than they use political science theories or economic theories. It is “what is this like that has happened in the past”.

Our goal is to move forward, but we know that to avoid falling backward, we must be willing to look backward and to come to terms with what happened in the past.

Certainly, the illiterates of past centuries, then an enormous majority of mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries and of their civilization. In the minds of modern illiterates, however, who know how to read and write and even teach in schools and at universities, history is present but blurred, in a state of strange confusion; Molière becomes a contemporary of Napoleon, Voltaire, a contemporary of Lenin.

The context of history proved invaluable.

I read a lot of history for fun.