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History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.

— John Buchan

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More quotes by John Buchan

Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.

A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906)

The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.

Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

Montrose and Leadership (1930)

I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.

Canadian Occasions (1940)

We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

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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: John Buchan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.