History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme.

This is very often attributed to Mark Twain, but the earliest published source yet located is by Joseph Anthony Wittreich in Feminist Milton (1987) where he writes: "History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme, and every gloss by a deconstructionist need not be a loss, pushing us further into an abyss of skepticism and indeterminacy."

James George Eayrs attributes the quote to Mark Twain as early as 1971 in his book "Diplomacy and its discontents", page 121: "When Mark Twain declared ‘History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,’ he went about as far as he could go."

A verse in John Robert Colombo's poem, “A Said Poem”, published in Neo Poems (1970), reads: “ ‘History never repeats itself but it rhymes,’ said Mark Twain.”

There is no substantive support for the Twain ascription. Precursors mentioning history and rhyme were published before 1970, but the statements were not compact and witty. In the introduction to the 1874 edition of “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day,” which he co-wrote with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, Twain did write "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends."