Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

In the words of a very famous dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it

History has no meaning.

The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes

Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about [history] than I know already. [...] Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only — finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and you past doings have been kist like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'. [...] I shouldn't mind learning why — why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike, [...] but that's what books will not tell me.

The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.

If history teaches us one thing, than that history teaches us nothing.

Do not read history. Read biography for it is life without theory.

What we learn from history is that no one learns from history

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

The person unaware of history is like a rudderless boat just floating out in the middle of the ocean, hostages to the waves and currents.

« You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.