A Quote by Henry A. Kissinger

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

Henry A. Kissinger

Quote Topics

Conclusions Correct Draw Even Learn Learn From The Past Nations Often Past Rarer

Quote Author

Henry A. Kissinger
Born: May 27, 1923

It is not often that nations learn from the past even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations.

Henry A. Kissinger

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

All history shows that, in exact proportion as nations advance in civilisation, the accounts of miracles taking place among them become rarer and rarer, until at last they entirely cease.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

It economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.

John Maynard Keynes

Cynicism often draws correct conclusions, but nobody could live by its lights.

Mason Cooley

Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

Mark Kingwell

The correctness of any of our policies has always to be tested and is always being tested by the masses themselves. We ourselves constantly examine our own decisions and policies. We correct our mistakes whenever we find them. We draw conclusions from all positive and negative experiences and apply those conclusions as widely as possible. In these ways relations between the Communist party and the masses of the people are constantly being improved.

Mao Zedong

The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them, they have a vision of the future.

Mary Parker Follett

As often as a study is cultivated by narrow minds, they will draw from it narrow conclusions.

John Stuart Mill

Much of economics isn't difficult, or rather, the difficulty is in cooking up arguments to "prove" that commonsense conclusions are wrong. The fact is that many commonsense conclusions are quite correct, and it takes a lot of education to get you to believe different.

Jerry Pournelle

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change.

Malcolm Fraser

When seen in retrospect, fashions seem to express their era. Although it is more difficult to draw conclusions from contemporary clothes, the same principles which hold for the clothes of the past must hold for clothes of the present and the future.

James Laver

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

If in the past, after every lost war, the unlucky vanquished were divested forever of their honor and their equality of rights, the League of Nations would even now have to be satisfied with a whole series of non-equal and thus ultimately dishonorable and inferior nations.