Kevin Duffy on history

Looking at history, it's like this movie that's unfolding.  If we understand history, we get a sense for how this movie, not how it ends, but where it's going.  We don't necessarily know all of the plot twists along the way; those may be a little more difficult to figure out.

~ Kevin Duffy, "China Isn't the Enemy - It's an Investing Opportunity," Stansberry Investor Hour, October 6, 2025

 

Alvin Toffler on past and future

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it.  True.  But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it.  And that could be worse.

~ Alvin Toffler

Phil Duffy on history

History is messy.  Until you learn that lesson, you are nothing more than a receiver and transmitter of propaganda.

~ Phil Duffy

As far as I am aware, Eamon Duffy is no relation to
 my father, Phil Duffy, just a wonderful coincidence.

Ana Bozovic on history

I always talk about how everything moves in cycles.  Why does it do that?  I have this theory harkening back to our concept of human nature, that history is the cyclical aggregate of human herding behavior... being pushed on by innovation.

~ Ana Bozovic, tweet, 5:30 mark, February 16, 2023

Alvin Toffler on history

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it.  True.  But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it.  And that could be worse. 

~ Alvin Toffler

Harry Truman on history

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

~ Harry Truman

Lee Kuan Yew on history and long-term thinking

If you do not know history, you think short term.  If you do know history, you think medium and long term.

~ Lee Kuan Yew, first Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990

Jim Grant on how history doesn't repeat literally

Now nothing says that today is going to repeat the experience of yesteryear.  In fact, rather the odds are against that just simply because history is never so helpful as to repeat itself literally; otherwise imagine how rich the historians would be.

They say, and what they say it true, that one's first experience in markets and with money is deeply formative, imprints itself on you.  And the best investors, the nimblest and most successful, are the ones who can put that formative experience aside, or at least put it into perspective and not imagine that they must repeat the experiences of their youth in their middle years.

~ Jim Grant, interview with William Green, 19:00 mark, August 20, 2022

Alexis de Tocqueville on history

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book Four, Chapter VIII

Frank Herbert on history

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact.  History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial.  The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes.  The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made. 

~ Frank Herbert

Milan Kundera on the struggle against power

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

~ Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

George Santayana on the distortions of history

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. 

~ George Santayana

Carl Sagan on the Big Lie

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. 

~ Carl Sagan

Barbara Tuchman on the pursuit of policies contrary to self interest

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. 

~ Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly

Howard Zinn on American history

American history is nothing to be proud of; on the contrary, it is nothing more than one long, disgraceful record of oppression, genocide and exploitation.

~ Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980)

George Orwell on falsifying history

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

~ George Orwell, 1984

Thomas Carlyle on history

History is the distillation of rumour.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Schopenhauer on history

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Voltaire on history

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.

~ Voltaire

George Santayana on history

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

~ George Santayana