Quotes from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.

I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

Philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.

A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence, if the State claims life, the individual must surrender it… All the worth which the human being possesses… he possesses only through the State.

Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.

As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity. The march of God in the world, that is what the State is.

Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.

Reason is the substance of the universe. The design of the world is absolutely rational.

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.

Education is the art of making man ethical