Source: Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States
“The devil does not sign contracts with just anyone. Upon the tens of millions, no judgment is pronounced. For them there is death, of course, but no doom. The trouble with history is its incorrigible and horrifying honesty. Only the truly doomed matter a damn to it. History is the abyss of the doomed.”
Source: The Tunnel (1995), p.185
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William H. Gass 16
Fiction writer, critic, philosophy professor 1924–2017Related quotes
“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
“Those who do not know their history are doomed to keep stepping in it.”
This evokes the famous statement by George Santayana in The Life of Reason Vol. 1 (1905): "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The Romantic Agony, p. 158
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)
"Jöns" (Gunnar Björnstrand) in The Seventh Seal (1957).
Films
“All things Death claims. To perish is not doom, but law.”
Omnia mors poscit. Lex est, non poena, perire.
From Epigrammata: De Qualitate Temporis 7, 7 as quoted in L. De Mauri, Angelo Paredi, Gabriele Nepi, 5000 proverbi e motti latini https://books.google.gr/books?id=hjiMpXCMCvsC&printsec=, Hoepli Editore, 1995, p. 384 and Hubertus Kudla, Lexikon der lateinischen Zitate https://books.google.gr/books?id=2Vtf_GVrdbgC&dq=, C. H. Beck, 2007, p. 416. The full text can be found in Anthologia Latina I, fasc. 1 (Walter de Gruyter, 1982) https://books.google.gr/books?id=PHWq0avQcGIC&pg=, ed. by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, p. 164. Harold Edgeworth Butler ( Post-Augustan Poetry: From Seneca to Juvenal https://books.google.gr/books?id=2gR48lrVJ-cC&dq=, Library of Alexandria, 1969, ch. 2, sec. 2) attributes De Qualitate Temporis to Seneca the Younger.
Misattributed