Quote of the Day (Eugen Joseph Weber, on Ages to Live Through and Learn From)

“Bad ages to live through are good ages to learn from. So we are tempted to plumb the past for answers to present quandaries, but in the end, one thing that we learn from history is that people seldom learn from history.” —UCLA historian and dean Eugen Joseph Weber (1925-2007), The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (1996)

That last observation could account for why a baby boomer who lived through Watergate never learned, once he became President, that a coverup is as bad as—if not worse than— the original crime.