Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. (8 September 1871)

With all the stir made about education, the ignorance of our own country's history is something lamentable and appalling and depressing.

I was struck by how ignorant we humans are, or make ourselves, of the passage of time itself. How brief our lives are!—and how meaningless the events which assail our little selves, when seen against the perspective of the great plastic sweep of History. We are less than mayflies, helpless in the face of the unbending forces of geology and evolution—forces which mold inexorably, and yet so slowly that, day to day, we are not even aware of their existence!

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

...I’m always shocked by the lack of historical awareness on the part of the average American. Many of the people who have come here did so to forget history, to turn their backs on history.

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

So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists.

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

We are choked with News and starved of History.

Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate.

We don’t keep records of our history and this is a sad reality of who we are.

We have failed in portraying historical events in an incorrect manner. Moreover, in allowing for the destruction of Churches and historic monuments, in someway we have allowed for the destruction of our own history.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

The misfortune of our time is just this, that it has become simply nothing else but 'time', the temporal, which is impatient of hearing anything about eternity.