“It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.”

Last update July 16, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it." by Henry Kissinger?
Henry Kissinger photo
Henry Kissinger 50
United States Secretary of State 1923–2023

Related quotes

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo

“What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 123
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

Samuel Butler photo

“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Life, ix
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part I - Lord, What is Man?

C. Wright Mills photo

“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”

Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.

Hermann von Helmholtz photo

“The sensations of our nerves of sense are mere symbols indicating certain external objects, and it is usually only after considerable practice that we acquire the power of drawing correct conclusions from our sensations respecting the corresponding objects.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist

"On the Physiological Causes of Harmony" (1857), p. 81
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
Context: As you are aware, no perceptions obtained by the senses are merely sensations impressed on our nervous systems. A peculiar intellectual activity is required to pass from a nervous sensation to the conception of an external object, which the sensation has aroused. The sensations of our nerves of sense are mere symbols indicating certain external objects, and it is usually only after considerable practice that we acquire the power of drawing correct conclusions from our sensations respecting the corresponding objects.

Enver Hoxha photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“We can draw lessons from the past, but we cannot live in it.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
William James photo

“This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.

Related topics