Whoever wishes to
foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those
of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who
ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they
necessarily have the same results.
Niccolo Machiavelli
After the first
visits, our conversations become eerie affairs, because I realized Djilas was
always right. He was able to predict the future. His technique was a simple one
for an East European, but a difficult one for an American: he seemed to ignore
the daily newspapers and think purely historically.
Robert Kaplan on Milovan Djilas
History not used is
nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you
don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
Arnold J. Toynbee
"Human nature
will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of
this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as
good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn
wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged."
Abraham Lincoln (in the context of The American Civil War of
1861 to 1865)
"History is for
human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done.
The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus
what man is."
R. G. Collingwood
"History does not repeat, but it does instruct."
Timothy Snyder
"History does not repeat, but it does instruct."
Timothy Snyder
Following are from “what
is History?” by E. H. Carr.....
"But when points of this kind are raised, I am reminded of
Housman's remark that 'accuracy is a
duty, not a virtue'." To praise a historian for his accuracy is like
praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete
in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his essential
function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is
entitled to rely on what have been called the 'auxiliary sciences' of history
archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, chronology, and so forth. The historian is
not required to have the special skills which enable the expert to determine
the origin and period of a fragment of pottery or marble, to decipher an
obscure inscription, or to make the elaborate astronomical calculations
necessary to establish a precise date. These so-called basic facts, which are
the same for all historians, commonly belong to the category of the raw
materials of the historian rather than of history itself."
"It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is,
of course, untrue. The facts, speak only when the historian calls on them: it
is he who decides to which facts to give the door, and in what order or
context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello's characters who said that a fact
is like a sack - it won't stand up till you've put something in it, The only
reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in
1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the
historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that
petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the
Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.
The fact that you arrived in this building half an hour ago on foot, or on a
bicycle, or in a car, is just as much a fact about the past as the fact that
Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But it will probably be ignored by historians."
"History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of
missing parts. But the main trouble does not consist in the lacunae. Our
picture of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not primarily because
so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large,
the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. We know a
lot about what fifth-century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but
hardly anything about what it looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a
Theban - not to mention a Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resident in
Athens. Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much
by accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a
particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth
preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modern history of the Middle Ages
that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion, I wonder
how we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of medieval
history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who
were professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who
therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything relating to
it, and not much else. The picture of the Russian peasant as devoutly religious
was destroyed by the revolution of 1917."
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