"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." - Brooks Atkinson, Once Around the Sun

"Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind." - W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

"Nostalgia is a seductive liar." - George Ball, in Newsweek

"Happy is the nation without a history." - Cesare Beccaria, Treatise of Crimes and of Punishment

"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave." - Anatole Broyard, in New York Times

"You can never plan the future by the past." - Edmund Burke, letter (1791)

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies." - Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays

"Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!" - Thomas Carlyle, Life of Frederick the Great

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" - Cicero, Orator

"The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here." - Finley Peter Dunne

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." - Graffiti

"What history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it." - Georg Wilhelm Hegel

"The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilisation of the Fabians." - William Ralph Inge, The End of an Age

"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." - Baruch Spinoza

"It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence." - SAMUEL BUTLER (d 1902), Erewhon Revisited

"History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable." - JOHN W. GARDNER, No Easy Victories

"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" - JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." - KARL MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

"'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" - GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

"A historian is a prophet in reverse." - FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL, in Athenaeum

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." - Bible (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." - Emerson, Ralph Waldo

"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." - Firth, Robert

"They all laughed at Albert Einstein. They all laughed at Columbus. Unfortunately, they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Jefferys, William H.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Kierkegaard, Soren (1813-1855)

"By holding fast to this Tao of old, you can harness the events of the present, you can know the beginnings of the past--here is the essence of Tao." - Lao-tse [Lao-tzu] (c604-c531 B.C.)

"What we should have fought for was representation without taxation." - Levenson, Sam

"If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is WITH representation." - Old Farmers Almanac

"Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, George [pseudonym of Eric Blair] (1903-1950) in '1984'

"History does not repeat itself. But it does rhyme." - Twain, Mark [pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)