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The value of history ... is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

— R. G. Collingwood The Idea of History (1946)

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More quotes by R. G. Collingwood

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

Speculum Mentis (1924)

Science is finding things out; and in that sense history is science.

The Idea of History (1946)

The ideal and the real are not mutually exclusive. A thing may be ideal and also real.

Some Perplexities about time: with an attempted solution (1925)

In actual history, events overlap ; you cannot, except by a confessed fiction, state the point at which the event called the Middle Ages ends and the event called the Modern Period begins.

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

R. G. Collingwood (1937)

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: R. G. Collingwood (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.