People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that those who shape history often lack an understanding of it, leading to repeated mistakes or misguided actions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights a paradox wherein individuals who are instrumental in shaping historical events often do so without a comprehensive knowledge of historical context. This ignorance can result in creating a history that may be flawed or reflective of past errors, suggesting that wisdom and understanding are essential for meaningful contributions to history.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about historical events and current affairs during a lecture.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Hasn't there always been a moon?" "Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky - it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue.
...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.
Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their faces, by something in their faces.
It is important that spiritual advancement must keep pace with material advancement.
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneβs self to die.
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