Historical Mistakes Quotes

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

If generations past could get things so badly wrong, then we are forever vulnerable as well.

The State machine breaks often down in consequence of mistakes made forty and fifty years ago …

History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

it’s only by studying the mistakes of the past,” Lucien said mildly, “that we can even have a future

I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

I did not, I could not and I will never invite Obote, ... This is because Obote is someone who made a lot of mistakes in our history.

I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated; we should probably make another set of mistakes.

How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?

The antiquity of an abuse is no justification for its continuance.

During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.

Over the course of history, governments, political regimes, and leaders have done some stupid things despite all arguments to the contrary, at times even against their own self-interest.

Must the mistakes of history be endlessly repeated? Granting PNTR to China will strengthen the hand of hard-liners, by telling the regime that America will never do anything meaningful to counter its aggression.

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

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no purpose.

History is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.

The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.

Those who don't know the mistakes of the past won't be able to enjoy it when they make them again in the future.

So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.

The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history-the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen