History Repeats Itself Quotes

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

“I believe history is a circle, made by men who don't learn from their mistakes.”
― Edward Hogan, Daylight Saving

“Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise To Power

“The mob, in the spirit of the age, obsessed with being on the right side of history, often ends up on the wrong side of history.”
― Criss Jami

“But it is dangerous to follow Examples, if they do not correspond in the most material Circumstances with the present State of our Affairs; are not conducted with equal Judgment, or attended with the like Prospect of Success.”
― Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy

“[N]ot only is the most marvellous event in this book collaborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages.”
― Herman Melville

“Now a regular occurrence in the eighteenth century repeats itself: the aristocracy accepts the viewpoint and standards of value of the middle class; virtue becomes a fashion in the upper class.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“For us to change history, we first need to change the future.”
― Anthony Liccione

“The footsteps of Western Civilization are currently hobbled by a serious case of fallen arches.”
― Jonathan Kieran

“The Holocaust is the lowest humankind has ever sunk. There had been massacres and genocide in the past. There had never been industrial-scale human slaughterhouses before. It was the perfect storm of absolute power inciting rabble-rousing hatred combined with advanced technology and the urge to kill in the primitive recesses of the human mind. I hope that the world never descends to that level of barbarity again. I fear that history's darkest stain will be deepened and surpassed in the future.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In history, a great volume is unravelled for our instruction, drawing materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France