"History is more or less bunk."

Puts my degree in perspective, certainly.

Course Ford was also an anti-Semite and Hitler supporter, so there's that...

History Is Bunk by Sergei Boukhonine:

"...many other examples strongly tempt me to agree with Henry Ford’s assessment of history as bunk. To be sure, "history is bunk" is an inappropriate and oversimplified generalization per se, but Ford did not put it quite so bluntly. Instead, he said the following:

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago Tribune, 1916).

This paragraph is still an oversimplification, but a more nuanced one. It’s about thinking about the present and the future rather than dwelling in the past. But here is a further quotation from Ford:

As a young man, I was very interested in how people lived in earlier times; how they got from place to place, lighted their homes, cooked their meals and so on. So I went to the history books. Well, I could find out all about kings and presidents; but I could learn nothing of their everyday lives. So I decided that history is bunk. (1935).

Now, this is a great observation! Many of us remember having to memorize historic dates and how pointless it was. It is also a known historical fact that the politicians who blundered into the WWI were students of history, but look how much good did their historical expertise do to them or millions of victims!"