"What is past is prologue." Shakespeare (see more quotes under "history")

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."   Churchill (see more quotes under "writing history")

"History is for human self-knowledge." Collingwood (see more quotes under "learning through history")

"The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are the premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw."  Nietzsche (see more quotes under "engineering and technology")

A sense of ambiguity:
"The training of engineers tends to suppress rather than encourage a sense of history, but it is clear that many engineers transcend their academic background." Eugene Ferguson, "A Sense of the Past"