Skip to content

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

— Konrad Adenauer Attributed Lend Me Your Ears: Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (2010)

Another quote →

Topics

History

More quotes by Konrad Adenauer

One does not throw out dirty water as long as one doesn't have any clean water.

In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity.

A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965)

We will never forget. If it takes us five or ten or twenty years, we will never rest until we get our revenge.

I see the significance of the Marshall Plan in the fact that probably for the first time in history a victorious country held out its hand so that the vanquished might rise again.

I wish that an English statesman might once have spoken of us as Western Europeans.

All Konrad Adenauer quotes →

You may also like

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