Time & Perspective Quote by Henry Hazlitt

Hazlitt is doing something sharper than scolding people to “read history.” He’s trying to puncture a recurring modern vanity: the belief that novelty equals progress. The line treats “brilliant innovations” like stage lighting - a glare that makes old furniture look new. That’s the sting. He doesn’t deny that societies change; he denies that today’s intellectual fashions deserve the moral prestige they claim, especially when they recycle mistakes with upgraded rhetoric.

The intent is polemical and preventative. Hazlitt, a classical liberal critic of economic fads and political wish-casting, is warning that public debate loves reinvention stories because they flatter the present. Calling an idea “innovative” is a social credential; it signals you’re forward-looking, compassionate, scientific, whatever the era’s preferred halo might be. His subtext: elites and institutions have incentives to forget. If a policy failed before, amnesia turns it into a second chance; if an argument was refuted, rebranding gives it a new audience.

The Orwell-adjacent cadence of “ancient errors” and “condemned to repeat it” isn’t accidental. It’s rhetorical judo: Hazlitt borrows a familiar maxim, then tightens the screw by insisting that repetition is not just likely but structurally baked into cultures that reward short memories. The line lands because it reverses the typical optimism of progress talk. Instead of history as a march forward, history becomes a loop - and the “advance” is often just the loop dressed in contemporary jargon.