Friday Philosophy

Here's a great line from The Future of an Illusion by the noted psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) that speaks to the ultimate value of history, and historical perspective:

"In general people experience their present
naively, as it were, without being able to form
an estimate of its contents; they have first to
put themselves at a distance from it - the
present, that is to say, must have become
the past - before it can yield points of
vantage from which to judge the future."