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| HISTORY |
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History's Wake
"Man . . . cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."- Karl Marx
"Great historical figures, heroes, great men of war no less than artists shelter themselves from death in this way: they enter the memory of peoples; they are examples, active presences. This form of individualism soon ceases to be satisfying. It soon becomes clear that if what is important is primarily the process which is history- action in the world, the common striving toward truth- it is vain to want to remain oneself above and beyond one's disappearance, vain to desire to immutable stability in a work which would dominate time. This is vain and, moreover, the opposite of what one wants, which is not to subsist in the leisurely eternity of idols, but to change, to disappear in order to cooperate in the universal transformation: to act anonymously and not to be a pure, idle name. From this perspective, creators' dreams of living on through their works appear not only small-minded but mistaken, and any true action, accomplished anonymously in the world and for the sake of the world's ultimate perfection, seems to affirm a triumph over death that is more rigorous, more certain."- Maurice Blanchot
"History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of now."- Walter Benjamin
"Finite history is the presentation or the becoming present of existence insofar as existence itself is finite, and therefore common…Community does not mean a common happening, but the happening itself, history. Community is the 'we' happening as the togetherness of otherness. As a singular being, I have a singular history (I exist) only insofar as I am exposed to and as I am within community, even if I do not have any special or important role to play with respect to the community."- Jean-Luc Nancy
"Acts themselves alone are history. . . . Tell me the acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish! All that is not action is not worth reading."- William Blake
"After examining these problems and the discussions they give rise to, it is simple enough for the historians to reconstruct the great controversies that are said to have divided men's opinions and passions, as well as their reasoning….It would be pointless to go back over the presuppositions inherent in such a method….the difficulty of apprehending the network that is able to link together such diverse investigations as attempts to establish a taxonomy and microscopic observations…"- Michel Foucault
"We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned."- Karl Marx
"Over the course of history, men learn that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"But what experience and history teach is this- that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."- Georg Hegel
"History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man's power in the world."- Heraclitus
"Universal history is the history of a few metaphors."- Jorge Luis Borges
"Interpretation can never be brought to an end, simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to be interpreted, since fundamentally, everything is already interpretation; every sign is, in itself, not the thing susceptible to interpretation but the interpretation of other signs."- Michel Foucault
"History . . . is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."-
Edward Gibbon
"Hardly last among the aporia of the age is that no thought holds true that does not do damage to the interests, even the objective interests, of those who foster it."- Theodor Adorno
"Error is the space in which history unfolds."- Martin Heidegger
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