“If we truly learn from history, the current reality should not suggest otherwise. It is ironic, because history proves that we have learned nothing.”

—  Titon Rahmawan

Last update Feb. 10, 2024. History

Related quotes

Desmond Tutu photo

“We learn from history that we don't learn from history!”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Often attributed to Desmond Tutu, actual source is G. W. F Hegel: What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)
Misattributed

“Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (9) "Guncrit"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

C. Wright Mills photo

“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.

“In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p 34
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

“Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1971) "The diminishing returns of science" in: New Scientist. (March 25, 1971) Vol. 49, nr. 744. p. 682
1970s
Context: Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.

Barack Obama photo

“We know a history so that we can learn from it. We learn our history because we understand the sacrifices that were made before, so that when we make sacrifices we understand we're doing it on behalf of future generations. There’s a proverb that says, “We have not inherited this land from our forebears, we have borrowed it from our children.” In other words, we study the past so it can guide us into the future, and inspire us to do better.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks to the Kenyan People (July 2015)

“You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

Address to Polaroid employees at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts (5 February 1960), as quoted in Insisting on the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (1998) by Victor K. McElheny, p. 198
Context: The world is a scene changing so rapidly that it takes every bit of intuitive ability you have, every brain cell each one of you has, to make the sensible decision about what to do next. You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

“The sad fact is how easily we forget the great events of the past. What we don't really learn from history education at school is how important it is for us to learn to never forget history as President Soekarno once said.”

Titon Rahmawan

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