“History is Philosophy teaching by examples.”

— Thucydides

Last update Oct. 2, 2023. History

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Thucydides 76

Greek historian and Athenian general

Related quotes

“History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

This quote was already published in 1853 http://books.google.com/books?id=LM0QVhkWKrcC&pg=PA129&dq=%22two+eyes+are+geography+and+chronology.%22#v=onepage&q=%22two%20eyes%20are%20geography%20and%20chronology.%22&f=false, when Garfield was only 22.
Misattributed

“I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

On the Study and Use of History, letter 2; in fact this relates to a third-century CE treatise on rhetoric, wrongly attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which says (xi. 2): "The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples". The line is not found in Thucydides.

“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923). First published in Vanity Fair.

“You insist on the example [of the death penalty]. Why? For what it teaches. What do you want to teach with your example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach thou shalt not kill? By killing.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Vous tenez à l’exemple [de la peine de mort]. Pourquoi? Pour ce qu’il enseigne. Que voulez-vous enseigner avec votre exemple? Qu’il ne faut pas tuer. Et comment enseignez-vous qu’il ne faut pas tuer? En tuant.
"Plaidoyer contre la peine de mort" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Plaidoyer_contre_la_peine_de_mort_-_Victor_Hugo [An argument against the death penalty], Assemblée Constituante, Paris (15 September 1848)