Ted Gioia:

One of the reasons why many historical cycles seem to recur every hundred years, more or less, is that the people who learned the lessons of this mostly forgotten past are dead and gone. We can’t hear their warnings, or benefit from their experience. So we are doomed to repeat their mistakes.

That’s why I’m always fascinated by things that happened almost exactly a century ago. They typically represent a comparable point in the cycle as the one we are currently living through. Yet those earlier events exist just beyond the horizon of our living memory — and thus tell us painful truths that we can only learn from history books.