People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.

If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it […]

For a hundred that can bear adversity, there is hardly one that can bear prosperity.

In that Malazan Book of the Fallen, the historians will write of our suffering, and they will speak of it as the suffering of those who served the Crippled God. As something … fitting. And for our seeming fanaticism they will dismiss all that we were, and think only of what we achieved. Or failed to achieve.
And in so doing, they will miss the whole fucking point.

Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.

Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.