Yuval Levin Quotes

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

Without understanding your history, you can't get a perspective about the present.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

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

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced

You must read history forward and not backward.

There is nothing more dangerous than mislearning the lessons of history.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

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.

History will show you not all the answers, but it’ll tell you a lot of the questions to ask.

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

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.

At times, we need to stop and rethink everything. Our entire history is made up of people who were sure they knew the truth yet forgot that the truth has an annoying tendency to change on occasion without us noticing it.

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

Personally, I like to put things in perspective.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.

Be sure to choose what you believe and why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.