A word to the wise is sufficient
-Plautus
Experience is the teacher of fools
-Livy


A wise person can learn immediately from what someone says while a fool never learns from someone else’s mistake is what Plautus and Livy are trying to tell us. Plautus and Livy’s quotes are mirrors of each other, one having a person understanding, and one having a person not learning. Both of these quotes pertain to our life and affect us in many different ways.

Our history follows Livy’s quote. In history, many events have repeated. Even though we experienced many different times, we still are not learning from our mistakes. The Great Depression, for one, is being repeated all over again. Although not as bad as the Great Depression, our economy is behind right now. In both cases, millions of people lost their jobs and many banks went bankrupt. Compared to the quote, our government is the fool, but even experiencing the same economic issues isn’t making them learn.
War also occurs time after time. In the past century, there have been more than ten wars that happened, yet the government still did not learn anything. Right now, North Korea and USA are about to start another war, due to North Korea’s threats. What our government doesn’t seem to understand is that we let countries come into power. All you need to do is take one look at Adolf Hitler. All the countries kept on pardoning him for his mistakes, thinking he would change. They all thought Germany was no threat until all of a sudden; Adolf Hitler takes over and begins his campaign for creating “perfect Germans”. Because we underestimated Hitler, we didn’t realize the full extent of his powers until he started World War II. The same thing is happening today. We underestimated North Korea and now paid the price. If we learned from our history, we can easily avoid events that aren’t necessary and progress forward by learning from mistakes.

Plautus’s quote applies to almost everyone’s life and is necessary for everyone to do in order to succeed in life. When you can tell that your parent is on the verge of yelling and glares at you, you can take the hint to not get into trouble. If you didn’t get the hint and got into trouble, it would result in an unhappy scene. Furthermore, if you weren’t good at taking hints at school, your grades may also be bad. For example, when a teacher says, “This is important,” it usually means, “This is going to be on a test.” When the teacher says, “We might have a quiz soon,” it means, “There’s a pop quiz tomorrow.” If one was not good at taking these hints, he would be constantly failing in school. This is not just an opinion by mean, it’s the truth. Some slow kids in our school never realize about the teacher’s hints that they always are surprised when greeted with a pop quiz. If everyone could understand the hints that are given in life, everyone will succeed and no longer fail in life as often.

If Livy’s quote stopped proving true and Plautus’s quote happened more often, our world will progress more and more. The future will actually be different and not follow the same pattern in history.