As I delve more and more into history, I am continuously astonished (I probably shouldn't be by now, haha) by the realization that history may not exactly REPEAT itself but, it sure does RHYME. After all, where else can a nation look to for guidance but in its own memorable history or other nations' histories, for that matter, in attempt to learn from or avoid making the same mistakes in future? Is that not the whole idea? Our duty to create a better future? How will posterity judge us? If history is a nation's memory, then America has national Alzheimer's.
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in an op-ed titled "Folly's Antidote" (The New York Times, January 1, 2007):
History is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.
"The longer you look back," said Winston Churchill, "the farther you can look forward... I believe consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation."
John F. Kennedy wrote in the Introduction to the American Heritage, New Illustrated History of the United States (1960):
History, after all, is the memory of a nation. Just as memory enables the individual to learn, to choose goals and stick to them, to avoid making the same mistake twice - in short, to grow - so history is the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg wrote:
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from.
Harvard Professor George Santayana wrote in Reason in Common Sense (Vol. 1 of The Life of Reason, 1905):
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Judge Leaned Hand wrote:
The use of history is to tell us... past themes, else we should have to repeat, each in his own experience, the successes and the failures of our forebears.
Aristotle, in his book Rhetoric (4th century BC), called this "deliberative rhetoric," using example from the past to predict future outcomes:
The political orator is concerned with the future: it is about things to be done hereafter that he advises, for or against.
Lord Acton wrote in 1877:
The story of the future is written in the past.
Patrick Henry stated March 23, 1775:
I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.
Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution of France, 1790:
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Cicero stated in Ad Brutum, 46 BC:
Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.
Will and Ariel Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization, 1967:
History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.
The Durants wrote in The Lessons of History, 1968:
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each new generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted...civilization would die, and we would be savages again.
Ronald Regan warned the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, March 30, 1961:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream.
The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.
And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.
Reference
Federer, W. J. (2020). Socialism The Real History from Plato to Present How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control. Virgina: AmeriSearch, Inc. (Pages 249-251)
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