Historical Trends Quotes

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

I write to learn the flow of history.

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.

Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we've changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.

There are two things that have been true throughout history in big hunks. You can find differences in ten years, but in 50 year hunks, 100 years hunks, you'll find two things to be true. One, the world is always getting better. Two, people always think it's getting worse.

History is the best guide to the future.

At BYU, I discovered history, then historiography. I became fascinated with the study of historians and historical trends, with the idea that the way we remember the past changes and shifts with our own preoccupations.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April, the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery, and the projections of the Bush Administration.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

I don't know that there has ever been a time when Abraham Lincoln didn't stand head-and-shoulders above all other presidents in the historians' eye. But relatively speaking, there have been peaks and a troughs. One peak was in the 1910s-20s; a major trough was in the 1970s-80s. We are certainly on a peak again, something which began in 1994 with Michael Burlingame's 'The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,' which showed in fabulous detail how many new and untapped sources were available on Lincoln.

I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen.

I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates.

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return.

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.

I'm not sure history has ended.

Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history.

A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.

One [has] to sense the trend of history and precede it.

I think certain periods of history don't get dealt with because I think historians, and it's their job, but they look back and look for patterns. They look for sequences and they look for reasons, and certain periods of history don't fit with the general pattern of 1500 to the 20th century, during which there's the creation of the United States.

History: the category of human phenomena which tends to catastrophe.