Fifth Law: All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
Fifth Law: All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson
Morgan Housel • Makes You Think
Thucydides wouldn’t have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a
... See moreJohn Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
The great biologist D’Arcy Thompson once said: “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” If he is right—if everything is the way it is because it got that way—then every science must be, in part, a historical science.
John Brockman • Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution (Best of Edge Series)
Pocock argues that while humanists, such as Machiavelli, believed that the citizen fulfilled himself through civic virtue rather than through ecclesiastical sacraments, they were still unable to develop a theory of history, or what Pocock calls historicism.