If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
~Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

The historian lays humanity on the couch. ~Lynn White, Jr.

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings. ~Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

History is philosophy teaching by examples. ~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War