History Repeats Quotes

“History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. The third time as tourist trap.”
― Sarah Vowell

“The early and relatively sophisticated Egyptians understood that their civilization would be threatened if they bred with the Negroes to their south, so pharaohs went so far as "to prevent the mongrelization of the Egyptian race" by making it a death penalty-eligible offense to bring blacks into Egypt. The ancient Egyptians even constructed a fort on the Nile in central Egypt to prevent blacks from immigrating to their lands. In spite of the efforts by the Egyptian government to defend their civilization, blacks still came to Egypt as soldiers, slaves, and captives from other nations. By 1,500 B.C., half of the population of southern Egypt was of mixed blood, and by 688 B.C., societal progress had ended in Egypt when Taharka became the first mulatto pharaoh. By 332 B.C., Egypt had fallen when Alexander the Great conquered the region.”
― Kyle Bristow, The Conscience of a Right-Winger

“History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.”
― William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other

“In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“Even after all these years, I am not tired of reading, thinking and writing about this time and the stories people told, and did not tell themselves. I still haven't explored all its corners. I don't know everything. These days, I feel its conflicts and parables running beside us with a particular urgency, crashing over contemporary questions of immigration, religion, and climate change, swirling around our political leaders, demanding: Look at me.”
― Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle

“Simply summarized by the Swiss historian J.C.L.S. de Sismondi, the 14th century was “a bad time for humanity.” Until recently, historians tended to dislike and to skirt the century because it could not be made to fit into a pattern of human progress. After the experiences of the terrible 20th century, we have greater fellow-feeling for a distraught age whose rules were breaking down under the pressure of adverse and violent events. We recognize with a painful twinge the marks of “a period of anguish when there is no sense of an assured future.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“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

“Idolatry is inherently paradoxical. Were we an ideally-flawed replication of the divine, free-thinking, history-repeating links in an outcast chain on a smaller, mortal scale, or is our imperfection a special dispensation? Are we a sly thought experiment? Shouldn't those we admire reflect this duality and our shared humanity — not a perfection that never was and never will be?”
― Stewart Stafford