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.
Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.
All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children.
Iβm losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
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