History...............................

David Merkel's always interesting Aleph Blog has a post up that starts this way:

“It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”
(attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Satchel Paige, Charles Farrar Browne, Josh Billings, and a number of others)

"A lot of what passes for investment knowledge is history-dependent, and may not serve us well in the future.  Further, a certain amount of it is misinterpreted, or, those writing about it, even really bright people, don’t understand the hidden assumptions that they are making."

Reading that caused me to want to dust off a few of my favorite quotes on "history":

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” 
-Julian Barnes

“History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.” 
-Bill Watterson

"Nothing in history is inevitable."
-Paul Ryan

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
-Aldous Huxley

“There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.” 
-Stephen Colbert