
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
Often attributed to Desmond Tutu, actual source is G. W. F Hegel: What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)
Misattributed
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”
Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.
Source: 1970s, Economics As a Science, 1970, p. 117
“Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.”
Kenneth Boulding (1971) "The diminishing returns of science" in: New Scientist. (March 25, 1971) Vol. 49, nr. 744. p. 682
1970s
Context: Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p 34
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)