“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.”
Source: Go Set a Watchman
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Harper Lee 142
American author 1926–2016Related quotes
“History repeats itself all the time on Wall Street.”
Source: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), Chapter XVIII, p. 217
“Progress is man’s indifference to the lessons of history.”
An Expensive Place to Die, Jonathan Cape (1967) Ch. 39
Augustus (1937)
Context: History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels, but we can trace a resemblance between the conditions of his time and those of to-day. Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin, and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires. Once again many accepted principles of government have been overthrown, and the world has become a laboratory where immature and feverish minds experiment with unknown forces. Once again problems cannot be comfortably limited, for science has brought the nations into an uneasy bondage to each other. In the actual business of administration there is no question of today which Augustus had not to face and answer.
Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto
“History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.”
As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas For Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter, p. 248
Speech on Afghanistan (4 January 1980) http://millercenter.org/president/carter/speeches/speech-3403
Presidency (1977–1981), 1978
“History repeats itself: historians repeat each other.”
" Some Historians http://books.google.com/books?id=E0luAAAAMAAJ&q=%22History+repeats+itself+historians+repeat+each+other%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage," Supers & Supermen: Studies in Politics, History and Letters (1920)
“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Origins unclear. Earliest known match in print comes from 1970, in a collection called “Neo Poems” by Canadian artist John Robert Colombo, who recalled reading it sometime in the 1960s. Twain did say "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends." in the 1874 edition of “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day”. A thematic precursor, "History May Not Repeat, But It Looks Alike", appears in a 1941 article by Chicago Tribune in Illinois. (Source: Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)
Misattributed