There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions and thus they must necessarily have the same results.

…a sense of history is essential to anyone who wants to be a leader, because history is both about people and about cause and effect. The American historian Samuel Eliot Morison liked to say that history teaches us how to behave—that is, what to do and what not to do in a variety of situations. History is the human story.

History also shows how the demands of leadership change from one era to another, from one culture to another.

"History is economics in action," as Karl Marx noted. Marx, who got almost everything else wrong but most likely got this right, connected economics to everyday reality.

In their famous book The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant explain that economics in action is the contest among individuals, groups, classes, and states for food, fuel, materials, and economic power.

When we think about technology, we immediately think about invention and innovation and the future, and not about how things come into use. We're always so enthusiastic about what's going to happen in five or 10 years' time. But we lack an explicit history of technology, by which I mean a history of the vast number of products that are in use at any particular time - as well as a history of innovation, outlining all of the inventions (large and small) from a particular period. Instead we have an unsatisfactory mixture of the two, leaving us with little more than excitable descriptions of the early life of some of the earth-shattering technologies that later became widely used.

That's a major gap, because if we're interested in the relationship between technology and society, we need to know what's in use and what advances are being made throughout a culture at any particular time. And it is just as important to understand the inventions that failed as it is to study those that succeeded.

Life can only be understood by looking back, but can only be lived by looking forward.

It can be said that the human being has changed very little during the known course of history. The statements by Plato, Aristotle, or Seneca about the human being, his/her behaviour and conduct, are as accurate today as they were in ancient times. We gain, therefore, valuable insight when we interpret current developments and the future in light of historical analogies.

The greatest weakness of American business is that it knows no history.

The information society is completed -- it's actually been around about 90 years. Now we're beginning the post-information society. In Alvin Toffler's terms, any time one of these new 'waves' comes in, like when the agricultural economy started giving way to the industrial economy, you have an 'epoch of uncertainty.' Now we're at a point where the uncertainty may never stabilize -- there is such a cascading of the amount of change with the rate of change. It isn't just about the acceleration of the pace of change. It's also the amount of it. The only certainty we can count on in the future will be a continuing state of uncertainty.

Every epoch has its organizing premise. When we were industrial, it was reason; when we were information, it was complexity, chaos theory, choice modeling...Now we think the new organizing premise is paradox.

So paradox becomes the organizing premise of the post-information society, just as complexity was the organizing premise of the information society. The key to paradox is that you don't do one or the other of those approaches; you do both.