Does history repeat itself only?

That's not meant to be taken literally. History repeats itself in the sense that we often make mistakes that we could have avoided if only we had looked at the past before making our decision about what to do in the present.

For example, "Alice" opens a Sri Lankan cuisine restaurant in downtown Cleveland in 2007. Hardly anyone eats there, and in 2008, Alice has to close that restaurant. Then, in 2009, "Bob" decides to start a Somalian cuisine restaurant in downtown Cleveland. Maybe Bob knows about Alice's failure. But if he refuses to learn from her mistakes and his restaurant fails, he will be repeating history. Not literally, but figuratively.

And of course there's plenty of examples from politics. Jay Leno warned us about Bush Jr. in 1999. We didn't listen.

Yes history does repeat itself if you look at what the revolutionary war was for.It was to get away from the central bank of england because king george wouldn't let the colonies operate a honest money system.

If you look at today the federal reserve is a central bank that won't let the united states operate a money system here

Look at germany staging false flag terror attacks on there country and blame communist terrorist hilter burning down his german palace building

Look at what happen on 911 a false flag operation done by the bush adminstration to further the profit for the u.s to get oil in iraq

THE SO CALLED WAR ON TERROR

I don't think so. History does repeat itself, and from what I've read of history, it seems like this repeating is not always avoidable. It's always easy to see, afterwards, that we made the same mistake again. But going in, it doesn't always look familiar.

In ancient times, there were lots of stories about powerful men, kings and emperors, who were warned by a seer or fortune teller of something bad that was going to happen. They tried to prevent it, and it was just this trying to prevent it that made it happen! This was a very common 'plot device' in ancient literature, and the idea was that the future is unavoidable, that things that are fated to happen are going to happen no matter what.

For instance, in the play Oedipus Rex, a king is told that his newborn son will grow up to kill him and marry his wife. He sells the boy into slavery, but years later meets a 'stranger' on the road, gets into a fight, and gets killed, not knowing it was his own son. Another example is in the Bible, where the Pharaoh is told that a boy has been born to the Hebrew slaves who will deliver them from slavery. He tries to have all the newborn boys killed, which causes Moses' mother to put him afloat in the river in a basket, and the Pharaoh ends up raising Moses in his own house, as his own son!

I don't believe that either, that fate can't be avoided. But what it shows is that not all disasters and bad decisions can be avoided.

"He who does not know the past is condemned to repeat it"