Repetition of Mistakes Quotes

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

There is one excuse for every mistake a man can make, but only one. When a fellow makes the same mistake twice he's got to throw up both hands and own up to carelessness or cussedness.

People tend to repeat the same quotes at me that I said when I was 23. And of course, you say things then, and sometimes they're ill-advised.

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it. Variant: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

The lesson of history is that no one learns.

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

But that's typical of me. "This is going to end in tears," I tell myself every time I balance a cup of coffee on the upholstered arm of the chair I'm sitting on. And then, lo and behold, the cup topples and even before it lands, I tell myself, "Told me so!" Not to spell out, or spill out, one of the metaphors of my life, but I always do the stupid thing and then I do it again. I never learn.

The circling horse was an oblique warning that i would repeat the same mistake eternally. Would the law of averages allow it? Can anything continue without change? Nothing else in nature behaves so consistently and rigidly as a human being in pursuit of hell.

When you repeat a mistake, it is not a mistake anymore: it is a decision.

It seems like people don't learn from the past.

Fools rush in where fools have been before.

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

I guess if you keep making the same mistake long enough, it becomes your style.