A Quote by Frank Herbert

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made.

Frank Herbert

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Absolute Accumulation Again Ages Believe Careless Choices Considered Corruption Dark Dark Ages Deliberate Discussed Distorted Error Fact Facts History Humanity Impartial Inevitable Learned Lessons Lessons To Be Learned Made Make Mistakes Never None Observers Particular Passage Passage Of Time Person Ramifications Recorded Religious Religious Sects Sects Series Set Sheer Should Then Thinking Thinking Person Thousands Thousands Of Years Time Version Views Whom Wise Wise Person Years

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Frank Herbert
American - Writer
October 8, 1920 - February 11, 1986

There's a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They'd rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.

A. Whitney Brown

If those people in power never made any mistakes, we'd be done for as a democracy. But people keep making mistakes. History is a series of mistakes.

Zephyr Teachout

Do not feel trapped by the facts of your history. Your history is not some set of sacred facts. History is an interpretation, and your history is yours to interpret. To know the history and then reinterpret it gives you additional depth.

Harriet Rubin

History is a series of mistakes. Now the task is to plan for those mistakes so those of us who are populists can actually take over the reins of power when the right mistakes are made.

Zephyr Teachout

What are your choices? Whom are your choices for? Not just for yourself. Chose now whom you will serve, and that choice is going to affect the next generation, and the next generation, and the next. Choice never affects just one person alone. It goes on and on and the effect goes out into geography and history. You are part of history and your choices become part of history.

Edith Schaeffer

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

A. J. P. Taylor

After school, I went to Damascus to study law and history, which I didn't really like. I didn't like history, in particular. In Syria, the regime was trying to present to us a distorted version of the past. Assad was shown as the father of history. So I decided to shift to film, which was something I had always loved as a teenager.

Mano Khalil

I have made some mistakes. No, a lot of mistakes. If you want to develop a new thing, a lot of mistakes will be inevitable. We should be allowed to make mistakes.

Masatoshi Koshiba

No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing.... Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes.

Henry David Thoreau

We're not served by only knowing our finest hours through film or media, or in the history that we are taught. I think the only way we have a chance to not make the same mistakes again, is to historically understand the bad behavior and mistakes we've made previously.

David Oyelowo

In 5,000 years of recorded human history... neither in the east or in the west... has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women. Not one in 5000 years of recorded human history. That's an astounding fact and it isn't until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women.

Michele Bachmann

As people of color, we're left out of history. History is sort of told around us. We're bystanders, we're passive, we're observers. We're never the center of our history.

Amma Asante

Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.

Fritz Stern

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on any lessons they might have drawn from it. Variant: What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

There's nothing like history. I don't make mistakes today that I made many years ago, because I've already made them.

Tilman J. Fertitta

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

Rudy Giuliani

A Quote by Frank Herbert

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