History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.

Darrow’s quip turns the familiar maxim “history repeats itself” into a moral indictment. If patterns of war, injustice, and social folly recur, the failure is not in the record of the past but in human unwillingness to learn from it. The line reflects Darrow’s broader skepticism about progress narratives and his lifelong engagement with the persistence of cruelty and irrationality in public life. By calling repetition “one of the things that’s wrong with history,” he implies that the past is not safely past: it keeps reasserting itself through institutions and habits, making historical knowledge valuable only insofar as it changes conduct.