History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.

This tendency of mankind to do, in general, this year what it did last, in spite of changes in some one department of life, — such as substituting a president for a king, traveling by rail instead of on horseback, or getting the news from a newspaper instead of from a neighbor, — results in what is called the unity or continuity of history. The truth that no abrupt change has ever taken place in all the customs of a people, and that it cannot, in the nature of things, take place, is perhaps the most fundamental lesson that history teaches. Historians sometimes seem to forget this principle, when they claim to begin and end their books at precise dates.

Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history.

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong.

The present enshrines the past—and in the past all history has been made by men.

... If in other respects the old condition of things be continued, and there be no discordance in their customs, men live peaceably with one another...

Men have had the same origin as other animals; they have the same general architecture of body and mind; and they have the same destiny. And they stand on the same general level of ethical claim and obligation.

Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past.

As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.

And wherever you go on the face of the earth have the humility to think that a thousand years ago someone pretty much like you stood there and a thousand years from now a boy like you will be there. And in two thousand years boys and places and people will have been pretty much the same.

As an amateur historian I think it’s the same, century after century: same shit, different flies.