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History Repeating Itself Quotes

Browse 41 quotes about History Repeating Itself.

History Repeating Itself Quotes

“People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame. Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, and a target lands on somebody’s back. They grow angry. They turn violent. To history, human nature must be a stubborn and tiring student. No matter how many times history tries to show it the error of its ways, it never learns from its mistakes.”

“Protesting and dishonoring your debts, duties and obligations give ride to your fall. Give ear as God calls, He's working through me. Substantial evidence of what's happening in todays world in the Bible for everyone to see but all are so blind for your lack of knowledge you suffer never destined to shine.”

“All of history, a great wheel, turning inexorably. Just as seasons come and go, just as the moon moves endlessly through her cycle, so does time. The same wars are fought, the same plagues descend, the same folk, good or evil, rise to power. Humanity is trapped on that wheel, doomed endlessly to repeat the mistakes we have we have already made. Unless someone comes to change it.”

“Exploring our history isn’t about wallowing in shame. We cannot ever own the attitudes and actions of our ancestors. But if we fail to see the legacy of tragic, discriminatory and inhumane events, we allow their influence to continue.”

“We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.”

“She cried until the sun started to set, until the birds settled into their trees. She’d have to tell her siblings he was gone. She felt embarrassed, thinking of how excited she’d been to take them to Bora-Bora. She grew cold, sitting outside in Brandon’s underwear. And then she stood up and dried her eyes. And she thought of June. She’d lived this all before, of course. Watching her mother go through it. Family histories repeat, Nina thought. For a moment, she wondered if it was pointless to try to escape it. Maybe our parents’ lives are imprinted within us, maybe the only fate there is is the temptation of reliving their mistakes. Maybe, try as we might, we will never be able to outrun the blood that runs through our veins. Or. Or maybe we are free the moment we’re born. Maybe everything we’ve ever done is by our own hands.”

“Slavery was horrible for all miss treated. The lack of compassion for another human was obsolete. (Misogyny ) Was quite prevalent back then as well as the legal doctrine of couverture. which for the record still exists to an extent. However the laws have not been officially demolished. nearly piece by piece broken away to fit within today's society. Slavery was not of color. ( SLAVERY WAS OF ALL COLORS ) !!!!!!!!! I am not racist, I do not believe human beings are illegal, I believe woman's rights are civil rights and yes I do believe in science. I respect you and your beliefs. I expect the same back!!!!!! HOWEVER, I DO NOT DISRESPECT MYSELF NOR OTHERS BY SAYING THOSE DAMN GERMANS, CHINESE, ENGLISH,BLACKS, JEWS, ETC. SO I TAKE OFFENSE TO BEING DISRESPECTED. WHEN I HAVE TO HEAR THOSE WHITE PEOPLE OR DUMB AMERICANS !!!!! I PROMISE YOU NO MATTER WHERE YOUR FAMILY CAME FROM THEY HAD IT HARD !!! VERY HARD!!! IN MOST CASES IT WAS SO PAINFUL THEY CAN'T BRING THEMSELVES TO TALK ABOUT IT!!!! I AM SURE THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE THROWING STONE ARE COMING FROM GLASS HOUSES. LOOK INTO YOUR OWN FAMILY HISTORY AND WHERE THEY CAME FROM AND I AM SURE THEIR HAVE BLOOD ON THEY HANDS!!!!!! NOT ALWAYS BY CHOICE HOWEVER BY SELF DEFENSE !!!!!!!!!!! By Bonnie Zackson Koury”

“In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.”

“A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.”

“A high school dropout, Robert Vesco bilked and conned his way to riches. Two times Forbes magazine named Vesco as one of the 400 richest Americans. The articles simply stated that he was a thief. As a man continually on the run, he was constantly attempting to buy his way out of the many complicated predicaments he got himself into. In 1970, Vesco made a successful bid to take over Investors Overseas Services (IOS), an offshore, Geneva-based mutual fund investment firm, worth $1.5 Billion. Employing 25,000 people and selling mutual funds throughout Europe, primarily in Germany, he thought of the company as his own private slush fund. Using the investors’ money as his own, he escalated his investment firm into a grand “Ponzi Scheme.” During this time he also made an undisclosed $200,000 contribution to Maurice Stans, Finance Chairman for President Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President, known as CREEP. To make matters worse, the media discovered that his contribution was being used to help finance the infamous Watergate burglary.”

“...the disease killed eight thousand...between its first appearance in October 1635 and its eventual disappearance in July 1637...The appalling impact of the plague had two significant consequences. One was that it created a shortage of labor and thus resulted in a rise in wages as employers competed for man-power.”

“The rate spread of EBOLA VIRUS in West Africa, is big tragedy. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.”

“Two categories of people can be found in the world today. There are those who make things happen and there are those who watch things happen. A spectator watch things happen while a player make things happen. In the same vein, history writers watch things happen and history makers make things happen. This is why history writers are always at the mercy of history makers.”

“The concerns and methods vary, but there is to it all, at bottom, a message that is unmistakably Luddistic: beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism.”

“A third layer of nativeness was composed of those whom others thought directly descended, even the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion of the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it. An unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future transplanted soils.”

“It was indeed the transcendent force of modernization that accounts for the unparalleled strength of Know-Nothingism in Massachusetts. The political fallout from the pressures of modernization, however, included more than the backlash of the native-born majority against immigrants, Catholics, and the South that most historians perceive as the essence of Know-Nothingism. Explosive urban and industrial growth had thrust the Commonwealth into the forefront of the industrial states in the antebellum period, creating, in the process, wrenching social and economic dislocations. The failure of the established parties to mount a significant response to the myriad issues and problems spawned in the matrix of modernization weakened partisan attachments and set the rank and file of the established parties on a quest for a political vehicle that would make a difference in their lives. In 1854, such a vehicle materialized in the form of an antiparty, antipolitician populist movement that promised to cleanse the statehouse of corrupt old parties and self-serving political careerists and turn the government over to the people so that they might right the wrongs that had for so long afflicted them. Among the afflictions, it is true, were the many social problems associated with mass immigration; but there were other troubling and pervasive concerns endemic to an unharnessed, rapidly expanding urban, industrial order, including the tyrannical factory system, the decline in the status of labor, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the deteriorating quality of urban life.”

“For more than a decade, the United States had been giving large-scale military aid to the French colonialists, and then to the American-installed but authoritarian South Vietnamese government, to fight nationalists and communists in Vietnam. More than 23,000 U.S. military advisers were there by the end of 1964, occasionally engaging in combat. On the other side of the world, the American public knew and cared little about the guerrilla war. In fact, few knew exactly where Vietnam was. Nevertheless, people were willing to go along when their leaders told them that action was essential to resist communist aggression.”

“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.”

“How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

“Nowadays, a simple faulty brake light traffic stop, can get a black person killed. It's better to fix the broken light bulb, then having to face and cooperate with a senseless police officer.”