“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

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.

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Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke photo
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke10
English politician and Viscount 1678–1751

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