Quotes About Not Knowing History

#1. Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.

Pamela Yates

#2. I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.

Rich Mullins

#3. When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.

Criss Jami

#4. We didn't win a Super Bowl together, and that's something I'll always regret - not knowing what that feels like. But you and I have won more games together than any quarterback and coach combination in the history of the NFL.

Dan Marino

#5. Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#6. The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable.
-Professor Charles Homer Haskins

Jill Lepore

#7. The power that comes from knowing the facts of history is dwarfed by the power that comes from being able to shape the stories about how that history is written and told.

Annie Leonard

#8. When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

Gerda Lerner

#9. Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

Jodie Foster

#10. People are educated into the fact that as a people we stand a better chance of knowing how to work the law if we know the history of the law and the history of our people's relationship with it.

Immortal Technique

#11. I think I was interested in history without knowing it and that became very clear when I arrived in France. Everything that I was really interested in was there, but I knew nothing, no education, no art education, no education beyond high school. It was extremely overwhelming and it still is.

John Howe

#12. There is no shame in not knowing your history, the shame lies in not finding out.

Habeeb Akande

#13. The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#14. History forgets the names of those people that cannot recognize times and seasons but it always remembers the names of those people that, by knowing God's time, stand in the gap for countries and nations.

Sunday Adelaja

#15. The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

Laura Lippman

#16. to know your past is to know your future. Where lies the strength of the stem and the fruits of the branches when the roots are rotten?

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#17. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

John F. Kennedy

#18. Knowing deep inside some ghosts are too cruel to question

Laura Wiess

#19. He left not knowing where he was going, he got there not knowing where he was, and he came back not knowing where he had been. But history books will point out Columbus as the person who made the Americas available for exploitation. I guess I can make the same kind of ridiculous claim.

Herschell Gordon Lewis

#20. How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

Polly Toynbee

#21. I don't think we can build much of a future,' says Shara, 'without knowing the truth of the past. It's time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.

Robert Jackson Bennett

#22. I went back and researched the history of gospel; where it came from, slavery times, communicating with each other without their master knowing what they are saying, and that gospel artists view themselves differently.

Boris Kodjoe

#23. It's bad idea to try to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.

E.H. Gombrich

#24. Knowing your history can give you the tools to shape your future.

Gloria Feldt

#25. This is the best possible way to retain important details that you wish to remember in any unified field of knowledge, whether it be the field of economics, science, history, or any other
link them up with related items which you already know or wouldn't mind knowing.

Ralph Alfred Habas

#26. There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.

Lene Hau

#27. When history looks back, it will prove what I'll die knowing.

Jack Kevorkian

#28. Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.

Chuck D

#29. It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

Cormac McCarthy

#30. In 1688 England contracted to the Netherlands the highest debt that one nation can owe to another. Herself not knowing how to recover her liberties, they were restored by men of the United Provinces.

George Bancroft

#31. Though I'm not religious, I am interested in religion. I read a lot of history and I think it came out of that. I just think I couldn't understand certain eras of history without knowing what these people believed in.

Hal Hartley

#32. What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

Isabel Wilkerson

#33. The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Golda Meir

#34. It isn't about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along.

Ishmael Beah

#35. The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.

David Attenborough

#36. Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.

Rachel Holmes

#37. I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?

Leslie Feinberg

#38. The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.

Atul Gawande

#39. History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Colm Toibin

#40. To die for a cause is easy, to live, to be steady day after day doing the small things, taking care of the details, knowing you will be forgotten by history and still choosing to do so, that is real courage

Anonymous

#41. While we are living in the present, we must celebrate life every day, knowing that we are becoming history with every work, every action, every deed.

Mattie J.T. Stepanek

#42. It was special with me being from Memphis and knowing the history of the venue, knowing all of the artists who performed in the Orpheum before me. Even having the idea to approach it was ambitious on my part, but I thought they would turn me down at first.

Yo Gotti

#43. Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.

Criss Jami

#44. Before I went to New Orleans, I was a little scared of New Orleans. I don't know why. I had only been there a few times. Something about it made me feel nervous, knowing a bit about the history.

Harold Perrineau

#45. I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle '60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater - which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time.

James Earl Jones

#46. Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.

Shannon L. Alder

#47. And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ... We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.

Niles Eldredge

#48. If knowing history made you rich, librarians would be billionaires.

Warren Buffett

#49. Knowing that history carried itself in the body and soul, not a physical location, not in letters burned in a fire or a magazine trapped beneath the rubble,

Kristen Simmons

#50. Knowing how to deal with change effectively is a primary requirement for living successfully in perhaps the most exciting time in all of human history

Brian Tracy

#51. I take comfort in knowing that the inevitable passage of time will erase my crimes from history.

Dennis B. Boyer

#52. Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.

Bruce Feiler

#53. It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research.

Dustin Lance Black

#54. My feeling says there is history here. But sometimes a thing might feeltrue to me, not because it is, but because the writer believes it is.

Pamela Dean

#55. If history offers no obvious solutions, however, it does at least provide the comfort of knowing that failure is nothing new.

Eamon Duffy

#56. History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future ... It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

Thomas Jefferson

#57. Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.

Justin Cronin

#58. The skills I acquired in Southeastern Louisiana University, Thrifty Drugs, Pacific Mutual, along with knowing the history, behavior and local staff, helped make Golden Eagle a success story.

Roger Wang

#59. Graphic designers should be literate in graphic design history.
Being able to design well is not always enough. Knowing the roots
of design is necessary to avoid reinvention, no less inadvertent plagiarism.

Steven Heller

#60. The best thing about getting older is knowing history. The longer you live, the longer you have been in a sport, the more you know, and the more you know where things started.

John Madden

#61. There is machinery in the mind that is consciousness. Knowing the machine is the dawn of a new era.

Allan Wesler

#62. Contrary to popular belief: Knowing where you are from will not really tell you where you are going. It will merely tell you why you are where you are.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#63. We are about to change history, said Saphira.
We're throwing ourselves off a cliff without knowing how deep the water below is.
Ah, but what a glorious flight!
(Eragon to Saphira)

Christopher Paolini

#64. How anyone can vote to support any form of fascism, knowing history, is beyond me - which leads me to draw the conclusion that either the people who voted to support it don't know what they are doing - or that they know exactly what they are doing.

Christina Engela