Quotes About History

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.

And all this, I repeat, occurred without any material necessity, from no other motive than a fine sense of honour and a magnificent surge of admiration and pity for a small foreign nation that was being unjustly martyred. We cannot repeat it too often: here, as in the case of the sacrifice which Belgium and England offered to the ideal of honour, is a new and unprecedented fact in history

Het verleden is altijd tegenwoordig. (The past is always present.)

I have lost, within these last few days, a little bull-dog. He had just completed the sixth month of his brief existence. He had no history. His intelligent eyes opened to look out upon the world, to love mankind, then closed again on the cruel secrets of death.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.

We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols.

History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.

Any commemoration is also a betrayal.

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained.

Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality).

We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.

This is where the mystification of institution comes from: as knowledge, it is necessary that institution is also ignorance, as ignorance (of its actual functioning) institution is also the knowledge of it (since it is in history as use value).

The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only humans and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.

There is a sort of maleficence in history: it solicits men, tempts them so that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks, and events change and prove that there was another possibility. The men whom history abandons in this way and who see themselves simply as accomplices suddenly find themselves the instigators of a crime to which history has inspired them. And they are unable to look for excuses or to excuse themselves from even a part of the responsibility.

Those who resisted were neither madmen nor wise men; they were heroes—men in whom passion and reason were identical, who in the obscurity of desire did what history expected and what was later to appear as the truth of the moment. We cannot remove the element of reason in their choice any more than the element of audacity and risk of failure.

The paradox of history...is that a contingent future, once it enters the present, appears real and even necessary.

What then is obsolete is not the dialectic but the pretension of terminating it in an end of history, in a permanent revolution, or in a regime which, being the contestation of itself, would no longer need to be contested from the outside and, in fact, would no longer have anything outside it.

True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew, and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history, but this responsibility also comes from a decision to which we commit our lives; and in both cases it is a violent act whose truth is confirmed through its being performed.

If one completely eliminates the concept of the end of history, then the concept of revolution is relativized; such is the meaning of "permanent revolution." It means that there is no definitive regime, that revolution is the regime of creative imbalance that there will always be other oppositions to sublate, that there must therefore always be an opposition within revolution.

History is not made in advance...It depends on the will and audacity of men upon occasion, and...it contains an element of contingency and risk.

We are not spectators of a closed history; we are actors in an open history, our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed. What we cannot imagine is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. Thus, as long as there are men, the future will be open and there will only be a probabilistic calculation and no absolute knowledge.