History Quotes

"History teaches us that the ruling classes have always invented new forms of domination."

"History is not progress but the history of how progress became impossible."

"History is not progress; it is a series of ruptures and transformations."

"Modernity has not overcome the problem of the exception."

"History is not a process of inevitable progress."

"The homogeneous state is a modern invention."

"History is the realm of contingency, not necessity."

"What we call progress often amounts to the perfection of domination."

"The integration of the working class proved that Marx had underestimated capitalism's integrative power."

"Critical theory must preserve the memory of what might have been otherwise."

"The totally rationalized society succeeds in making irrationality appear inevitable."

"Heritage and tradition gain meaning only through the creative reinterpretation of each new generation."

"The trouble with the modern age is its loss of historical sense."

"The purpose of history is not to explain the past but to illuminate the present."

"History is a graveyard of utopian schemes."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

"Memory is more than individual psychology; it is a social and political force."

"History is the history of suffering inscribed in the bodies and psyches of the oppressed."

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."

"Only the Greeks discovered freedom and understood it as a political concept."

"Imperialism was, in a sense, the ideal of the old Greek and Roman civilization."

"The past attacks us in the form of questions we cannot avoid."

"The destruction of traditions is as much a part of human history as their creation."

"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts."

"The victors write history, and thus they write the law."

"The stronger party has always determined the form of international law."

"The nation-state emerged from the need to concentrate power for decisive action."

"Modern revolution attempts to escape history by denying that tradition has any claim."

"The modern state achieved its independence by monopolizing legitimate force."

"Liberalism destroyed the feudal order but could not establish its own stable political form."