José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor
Source: Interview. Torreblanca, M. E. Entrevista al escritor José Baroja. Fondo de Cultura Económica. https://www.fondodeculturaeconomica.com/Noticia/706
A collection of quotes on the topic of repeat, time, timing, doing.
José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor
Source: Interview. Torreblanca, M. E. Entrevista al escritor José Baroja. Fondo de Cultura Económica. https://www.fondodeculturaeconomica.com/Noticia/706
“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman
“You can't undo the past but you can certainly not repeat it.”
Bruce Willis (1955) American actor, producer, and musician
US Magazine. Issue 249.
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister
Compare sourced quote set forth above: "The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it." <br class="br">Attributed to Goebbels in Publications Relating to Various Aspects of Communism http://books.google.com/books?id=iLAnAQAAMAAJ&q=%22If+you+repeat+a+lie+often+enough,+people+will+believe+it.%22&dq=%22If+you+repeat+a+lie+often+enough,+people+will+believe+it.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U4gPUvObG4qMyQHlhYAw&ved=0CGQQ6AEwCQ (1946), by United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities. No reliable source has been located, and this is probably simply a further variation of the Big Lie idea. <br class="br">Variants: <br class="br">If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. <br class="br">If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. <br class="br">If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. <br class="br">If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes truth. <br class="br">If you repeat a lie many times, people are bound to start believing it. <br class="br">Attributed in The Sack of Rome (2006) by Alexander Stille, p. 14, and also attributed in A World Without Walls: Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance (2003) by Mike Moore, p. 63. <br class="br">Misattributed
Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism
Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 68 ; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 6-7
Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor
Babur writing about the battle against the Rajput Confederacy led by Maharana Sangram Singh of Mewar. In Babur-Nama, translated into English by A.S. Beveridge, New Delhi reprint, 1979, pp. 547-572.
1983
“You're a jerk,' repeated the alien, 'a complete asshole.”
Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything
Source: Life, the Universe and Everything
Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist
Variant: Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Source: Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) former Palestinian President, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient
1970s, Speech to UN General Assembly (1974)
Ian Smith (1919–2007) Prime Minister of Rhodesia
Nigel Rees, "Sayings of the Century", Unwin paperbacks, 1984, p. 247.
Radio broadcast, March 20, 1976.
Peter Godwin, Comment in the Guardian(UK) Newspaper http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/25/comment.zimbabwe.
Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America
2011, UN speech to General Assembly (September 2011)
Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest
Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto
Sebastian Bach (1968) Canadian singer
http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=60702 Blabbermouth.net (October 21, 2006)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer
Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967); as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970).
Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches
Letter to Capito, January 1, 1526 (Staehelin, Briefe ausder Reformationseit, p. 20), ibid, p. 249-250
1978
Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821) Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer, and diplomat
"Bacon's Religion," p. 293
An Examination of the Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1836)
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist
Quote from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1987) by Pierre Cabanne
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989
Source: Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love
“To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Draft manuscript (c.1881), quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912), p. 724 http://books.google.com/books?id=2UYLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA724#v=onepage&q&f=false <br class="br">Variant: Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
J'accuse! (1898)
Context: These military tribunals have, decidedly, a most singular idea of justice.
This is the plain truth, Mr. President, and it is terrifying. It will leave an indelible stain on your presidency. I realise that you have no power over this case, that you are limited by the Constitution and your entourage. You have, nonetheless, your duty as a man, which you will recognise and fulfill. As for myself, I have not despaired in the least, of the triumph of right. I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.
“Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.”
Hakim Bey (1945) American political writer, poet and essayist
“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Origins unclear. Earliest known match in print comes from 1970, in a collection called “Neo Poems” by Canadian artist John Robert Colombo, who recalled reading it sometime in the 1960s. Twain did say "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends." in the 1874 edition of “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day”. A thematic precursor, "History May Not Repeat, But It Looks Alike", appears in a 1941 article by Chicago Tribune in Illinois. (Source: Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/) <br class="br">Misattributed
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism
This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke (in Revolution in France) that often leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
Source: The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
Context: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.”
Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin
Source: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Context: All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. …Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Book VI, Chapter 7.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Vivian Grey (1826)
Jay London (1966) American comedian
Self-degradation
Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur
The Failure of Haile Selassie as Emperor in The Blackman, April, 1937.
Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) physicist
From the preface to Elementary Principles in Statististical Mechanics (1902), p. viii. Full book https://archive.org/details/elementaryprinc00gibbgoog
Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society
Furchtbares hat die Menschheit sich antun müssen, bis das Selbst, der identische, zweckgerichtete, männliche Charakter des Menschen geschaffen war, und etwas davon wird noch in jeder Kindheit wiederholt.
E. Jephcott, trans., p. 26
Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1944)
Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian
On Hinduism (2000)
Walter Savage Landor Imaginary Conversations
"Aesop and Rhodopè", I.
Imaginary Conversations (1824-1829)
Kurt Vonnegut book Bluebeard
Source: Bluebeard (1987), p. 91, referring to George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Whig Circular (1843), reported in Richard Watson Gilder and Daniel Fish Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 1 (1905)
1840s
Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now
“Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”
The Power of Now (1997)
Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher
"Abuse of Words" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35621/35621-h/35621-h.htm (1764) <br class="br">C.f. Locke: "The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition; the names of all complex ideas are. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; the want whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined; and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference), when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before." <br class="br">An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Book III http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book3.html, chapter 4 <br class="br">Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
“History repeats itself all the time on Wall Street.”
Edwin Lefèvre book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Source: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), Chapter XVIII, p. 217
Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory
"Über unendliche, lineare Punktmannigfaltigkeiten" in Mathematische Annalen 20 (1882) <!-- pp 113-121 --> Quoted in "Cantor's Grundlagen and the paradoxes of Set Theory" by William W. Tait
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1846/feb/20/commercial-policy-customs-corn-laws in the House of Commons (20 February 1846). <br class="br">1840s
Errol Morris (1948) American filmmaker and writer
Or how about this: "Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it." <br class="br">Source: The Grump (no. 1) http://www.errolmorris.com/content/grump/grump1.html
Xi Jinping (1953) General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and paramount leader of China
As quoted in "China's Xi to tread peaceful, patient path on Taiwan" http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/25/us-china-taiwan-idUSBRE91O0CC20130225 in Reuters (25 February 2013). <br class="br">2010s
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
After some fifty or sixty repetitions, this remark ceased to amuse me.
Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 9
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917–2007) American historian, social critic, and public intellectual
The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) p. 91
Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)
Address to the Nation on the United States Air Strike Against Libya http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/41486g.htm (14 April 1986) <br class="br">1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)
Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer
Comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy
Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise
Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 16: Outlook Unsettled (p. 137)
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 446.