E. L. Doctorow Quotes

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

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

Treat the past as a school.

History, in [Nietzsche's] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men's great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

I think it is vitally important to study History. If we are going to lead Britain safely into the future, it is essential that we understand our country's historical roots. If we can learn the lessons of the past, we will be able to avoid making mistakes in the future.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

To understand the living present, and the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.

We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.

You can only understand the present age when it is past.

To build up a future, you have to know the past.

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.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As a person deprived of memory becomes disorientated and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going , so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

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

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.