Quotes About History

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of world history- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

Direct self-observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves; indeed, we ourselves are nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continual flowing.

This is precisely why the Jews are the most disastrous people in world history: they have left such a falsified humanity in their wake that even today Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism.

history would be nothing but a record of stupidity save for the cunning

The beast lives unhistorically; for it 'goes into' the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.

Deutschland über alles - I fear that was the end of German Philosophy.

The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? This question is one which ought to be studied

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?

The history of moral feelings is the history of an error, an error called "responsibility", which in turn rests on an error called "freedom of the will".

But this nation has deliberately made itself stupid, for practically a thousand years: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused.

The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge--what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?

Bad men have no songs'.* – How is it the Russians have songs?

There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly.

Every past is worth condemning.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

where is the deceiver to be found?' – 'We've got it,' they cry in delight, 'it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which deceive us about the real world. Moral: escape from sense-deception, from becoming, from history, from falsehood – history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in falsehood.

The commencement of all great things in the world is thoroughly and continuously saturated with blood.

That Luther's Reformation succeeded in the North suggests that the north of Europe was retarded compared to the south...