Quotes About History

Maybe a knowledge of literature and history was of no immediate benefit to a soldier in the ranks during the second world war; without it, however, it would have been impossible for Churchill to exert the kind of leadership that distinguished him, and which aroused even in the most uneducated the sense that far more was at stake than he could easily define.

Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and although that result is not perhaps inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions....Radical individualists enter the world without social capital of their own, and they consume all that they find.

It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance.

The very same 'mystery' that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.

A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

To put the point another way: the Marxist theory of history, which explains all historical development as the product of changes in the economic infrastructure, is false.

The lesson of history for Hume is that the established order, founded on customs that are followed and accepted, is always to be preferred to the ideas, however exultant and inspiring, of those who would liberate us from our inherited sense of obligation.

Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.

The dead and the unborn make their presence known through traditions, institutions, and laws.

Whatever we think about the revolutions, the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.

Nothing is cheaper than past glories.

Each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of moontide, the slow poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.

there was another, gorier parturition, when two nations incarnated out of one. A foreigner drew a magic line on a map and called it the new border; it became a river of blood upon the earth. And the orchards, fields, factories, businesses, all on the wrong side of that line, vanished with a wave of the pale conjuror's wand.

When a culture vansihes, humanity is the loser.

When a culture vanishes, humanity is the loser.

Un peuple, qui avait perdu l'habitude de forger sa propre histoire, se contentait désormais d'assister en habit du dimanche à une parodie : car nous l'avons vu, les armes des gladiateurs et les techniques de combat empruntées successivement aux peuples vaincus étaient comme l'image fossilisée de la conquête romaine. À cet égard, l'amphithéâtre remplaçait le feuilleton historique.

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures , nothing but mutations.

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

To visit the Tower, then, is to enter into contact not with a historical Sacred, as is the case for the majority of monuments, but rather with a new nature, that of human space: the Tower is not a trace, a souvenir, in short culture; but an immediate consumption of a humanity made natural by that glance which transforms it into space.

Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.

Another kind of joy, more sober because more responsible, is mine today as well: that of entry into a place that we can strictly term outside the bounds of power. For if I may, in turn, interpret the Collège, I shall say that it is, as institutions go, one of History's last stratagems. Honor is usually a diminution of power; here it is a subtraction, power's untouched portion.

either the intention of the myth is too obscure to be efficacious, or it is too clear to be believed. In either case, where is the ambiguity? This is but a false dilemma. Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. […] driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it. We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally , a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence

Todo lo que es anacrónico es obsceno. Como divinidad (moderna), la Historia es represiva, la Historia nos prohíbe ser inactuales. Del pasado, no soportamos más que la ruina, el monumento, el kitsch o el retro, que es divertido; reducimos ese pasado a su sola rúbrica.