The Jewish Wisdom Database

When you whitewash your home, leave a small patch bare to remind you of the Temple's destruction! [Tisha B'Av]

The concept of history is the product of Prophetism.

History is the study of other people's mistakes.

A people's memory is history; and as a man without a memory, so a people without a history cannot grow wiser, better.

History is not merely the record of a string of occurrences. It is an attempt to seize occurrences in their pattern.

Ages employed in making history have no time for studying it.

The history of the world is the judge of the world.

History has no time to be just...She keeps her eyes fixed on the victorious, and leaves the vanquished in the shadows.

The historian's special interest in the Jewish nation is due to its being the only one that is met with at evey turn of history.

The history of the Jewish people is like an axis crossing the history of mankind from one of its poles to the other.

Blood and fire and pillars of smoke---Joel (Yoel) 3:3---this is the whole history of the Jews; the rest is commentary; study it.

To see in history a moral purpose and a task for a people on earth is a great discovery, far more important than the accounts of battles and intrigues that have plagued humanity from time immemorial.

Many pens are broken, and seas of ink consumed, to descibe things that never happened.

The Jews are God's stake in human history.

Research into the past, as an aim in itself, without the 'present', is not worth a bean.

The philosophy of a nation is to be found in its proverbs at times.

As the generation, so the leader; as the leader, so the generation.