Quotes from Fernand Braudel

History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance.

Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.

Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves little trace in history.

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

The movement of history is slow and covers vast reaches of time: to cross it requires seven-league boots.

The obstinate presence of the past greedily and steadily swallows up the fragile lifetime of men.

Attempting to write the entire history of the world might nevertheless be thought sufficiently daunting an enterprise to discourage the most intrepid and even the most naive. It is like trying to chart a river with no banks, no source and no mouth--and even this comparison is inadequate, for history is not one river but several.

War, the begetter of all things, the creature of all things, the river with a thousand sources, the sea without a shore: begetter of all things except peace, so ardently longed for, so rarely attained.

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

A culture is a civilization that has not yet achieved maturity, its greatest potential, nor consolidated its growth. Meanwhile--and the waiting period can be protracted--adjacent civilizations exploit it in a thousand ways, which is natural if not particularly just.

The chief privilege of capitalism, today as in the past, remains the ability to choose.... And since it does have the freedom to choose, capitalism can always change horses in mid-stream--the secret of its vitality.

History is made up of hundreds of correlations, and at best we manage to see a few of them. So let us not jump to conclusions on the basis of oversimple premises.

The fundamental reality of any civilization must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers. Civilizations are regions, zones not merely as anthropologists understand them when they talk about the zone of the two-headed axe or the feathered arrow; they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through his efforts.

We shall not allow ourselves to repeat the often-voiced opinion that "civilizations are mortal." Mortal perhaps are their ephemeral blooms, the intricate and short-lived creations of an age, their economic triumphs and their social trials, in the short term. But their foundations remain. They are not indestructible, but they are many times more solid than one might imagine.

When discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is as well to mark their rate of growth, avoiding the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and auscultation--and as in medicine there is always room for error.

The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?

Can there be any study of humanity, in 1946, without historians who are ambitious, conscious of their duties and of their immense powers?

Une civilisation 'seconde': comme le christianisme a hérité de l'Empire romain qu'il prolonge, l'Islam se saisira, à ses débuts, du Proche-Orient, l'un des plus vieux, peut-être le plus vieux carrefour d'hommes et de peuples civilisés qui soit au monde.

L'Islam, durant le printemps de son expansion, ne fait que rendre vie à l'antique civilisation orientale (...). Il s'agit là d'une civilisation solide e édifiée sur des régions fort riches, auprès desquelles l'Arabie fait très pauvre figure.

C'est en Méditerranée que s'est joué le sort maritime, mondial de l'Islam. Là, il aura gagné, désespérément combattu et, finalement, perdu.

L'Islam du XIVe siècle abonde en déracinés de ce genre - comme les compatriotes de Ceuta que Ibn Batouta rencontre en Chine - que l'hospitalité musulmane (pareille à l'hospitalité russe) accueille sans défaillance, de l'Atlantique au Pacifique.

L'apogée, la splendeur de l'Islam se situent entre VIIIème et XIIème siècles. Mais la perte très dangereuse de vitesse n'a guère commencé pour lui qu'avec le XVIIIème siècle, c'est-à-dire, à l'échelle lente des civilisations.