“It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.”
Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes

“No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.”
Source: Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul
Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XV: The Last Men; Section 4, “Cosmology” (p. 229)
“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 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

and lets fly with a club.
Statement in Analog Science Fiction/Fact magazine (1965)