Quotes About History

In our very present, we discover a layer of spiritual being, i.e., of historical being, delimiting a 'space of humanity,' and geometry is offered as belonging to it, I.e., geometry is offered as connected to a past in general, to men who as such are not known by us. But this nonknowledge is a knowledge. The essence of tradition lies in being not immediately graspable in a static essence. In front of our reflection, geometry and its tradition become a hollow; they open a dimension.

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

History... is the perpetual conversation carried on between all spoken words and all valid actions, each in turn contesting and confirming the other, and each recreating all the others.

Man is an historical idea, not a natural species.

History has no single signification; what we do always has several senses, and this is how an existential conception of history is distinguished from both materialism and spiritualism.

Historical invention works through a matrix of open and unfinished significations presented by the present. Like the touch of a sleepwalker, it touches in things only what they have in them that belongs to the future.

Discoveries' in philosophy are always at the same time inventions...Truth is not ready-made in things, and yet, by a 'retrograde movement,' it presents itself to us as existing prior to our act of knowledge. We encounter reality: that is the cause and effect of the knowledge we have of it. This circle is the definition of history, and it is up to the philosopher to learn to live with it.

The psychology of men and women in our civilization does not signal an eternal masculine or feminine...We must not...consider the attributes of the woman or the man as natural, but as historical.

It is only afterwards, once human invention has reintegrated them in the meaning of the totality, that the hazards of history can appear to be and are in fact rational without there being any place for the assumption of a hidden reason which orients them through the "ruse" of appearing in the guise of contingency.

What we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history--or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.

History, then, is neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but rather the unique movement that both creates forms and shatters them.

History does not provide me with its sense ready-made. I have to remake it, but my interactions with history form me, they give way to a labor at the end of which I cannot say that I donate sense, for my criteria are put in question there...Here to receive is to give, in effect, but to give is to receive. Such is the sense of the notion of field and of institution: they give what they do not have and what we receive from them, we bring to them.

By institution we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequence or history--or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future.

There must be a presence of the past which is absence.

The idea of institution is precisely the foundation of a personal history on the basis of contingency.

History repeats itself because man remains at the same level of being—namely, he attracts again and again the same circumstances, feels the same things, says the same things, hopes the same things, believes the same things. And yet nothing actually changes. All the articles that were written in the last war are just the same as the articles written in this war, and will be for ever and ever. But what concerns us more is that the same idea applies to ourselves, to each individual person.

This formidable officine dates from Peter the Great, who formed it in 1697...its historic origins must, however, be looked for much earlier; one finds them in the byzantine traditions and in the operations of the Tartar domination...espionage, delation, torture, and secret executions were the normal and regulating instruments of the |||||||| police.

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion." Gerald R. Ford, thirty-eighth President of the United States of America. Served 1974–1977. The

The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.

The here and now is shaped by the back then..

All empires fall, eventually." "But why? It's not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power are replaced by those who have known nothing else. Who have no comprehension of the need to rise above base desires.["]

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled.

The course of history has often been turned by sentiment, but by thought never. The thinkers are but valuable ornaments. A safe place is assigned to them on the world's mantelpiece, while humanity basks and blinks stupidly on the hearth.