Thursday, July 24, 2025

What do wise (men and women) learn from history?

 

History quotes from Men and then Women.

“We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."  -- Ronald Reagan  40th US President  His farewell address in January 1989

 

"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." G. Michael Hopf  in  "Those Who Remain". Reflecting the cyclical nature of history.

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph”  Haile Selassie

'We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!" Desmond Tutu

“The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.”  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it; but those who have studied history are nevertheless doomed to stand by while history is repeated anyway." -- anonymous 

“The history of civilization is largely the history of weapons”.  George Orwell.

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance."  Paul Johnson

“[O]ne of the most refined (and rare) certainties of liberalism is that historical determinism does not exist. History has not been written so as to negate any further appeal. History is the work of men, and just as men can act rightly with measures that push history in the direction of progress and civilization, they can also err, and by conviction, apathy, or cowardice, allow history to slide into anarchy, impoverishment, obscurantism, and barbarism. The culture of democracy can gain new ground and consolidate the advances it has achieved. Or, it can watch its dominions shrink into nothingness, like Balzac's ‘peau de chagrin’. The future depends on us--on our ideas, our votes, and the decisions of those we put in power.   Mario Vargas Llosa, Liberalism in the New Millennium [2000]

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written history of this generation.” Robert F Kennedy’s 1966 “Ripple of Hope” speech.  RFK

History quotes from Men and then Women.

“We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."  -- Ronald Reagan  40th US President  His farewell address in January 1989

"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." G. Michael Hopf  in  "Those Who Remain". Reflecting the cyclical nature of history.

'We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!" Desmond Tutu

“The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.”  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it; but those who have studied history are nevertheless doomed to stand by while history is repeated anyway." -- anonymous

“The history of civilization is largely the history of weapons”.  George Orwell.

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance."  Paul Johnson

“[O]ne of the most refined (and rare) certainties of liberalism is that historical determinism does not exist. History has not been written so as to negate any further appeal. History is the work of men, and just as men can act rightly with measures that push history in the direction of progress and civilization, they can also err, and by conviction, apathy, or cowardice, allow history to slide into anarchy, impoverishment, obscurantism, and barbarism. The culture of democracy can gain new ground and consolidate the advances it has achieved. Or, it can watch its dominions shrink into nothingness, like Balzac's ‘peau de chagrin’. The future depends on us--on our ideas, our votes, and the decisions of those we put in power.   Mario Vargas Llosa, Liberalism in the New Millennium [2000]

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written history of this generation.” Robert F Kennedy’s 1966 “Ripple of Hope” speech.  RFK

BELOW are Women’s quotes regarding history

 Barbara Tuchman (historian, The March of Folly):  “To a historian, hindsight is not merely clearer than perception-in-the-moment but also unfair to those who actually lived through the moment.”

“The persistence of error is the rule in human history.”

Maya Angelou (poet, civil rights activist):  “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Margaret MacMillan (historian, The Uses and Abuses of History): “History is not a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims.”

Gerda Lerner (pioneering feminist historian): “When I discovered the existence of women’s history, I discovered my own history. That changed my life.”

“The system perpetuates itself by teaching us to forget history. That forgetting is a form of power.”

On Power, Memory, and Truth

Arundhati Roy (writer, activist):  “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

Simone de Beauvoir (philosopher, feminist): “The past is an anchor, not a sail.”

Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks (author, cultural critic):  “Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. That’s why I believe reading, and especially reading history, is a form of resistance.”

On Gender, Erasure, and Historical Justice

Roxane Gay (author, essayist): “The problem is not that history is written by the victors. It’s that it’s usually written by the same kind of victors—white, male, and privileged.”

Mary Beard (classicist, historian):  “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.”

Audre Lorde (writer, civil rights activist):  “Your silence will not protect you.”

In my opinion - here is the best for last!!! 

“It takes a female to have a baby,
It takes a woman to raise a child,
It takes a mother to raise them correctly,
It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.”
Shannon L. Alder 

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