“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.

Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything.

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.

Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.

The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.

Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do.

The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.

The most obvious symptoms of an epoch-making system are the misunderstandings and the awkward conduct of its adversaries.

War is progress, peace is stagnation.

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

Remember where you came from.

Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.

Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.

I really like to look like a history book. I can look the 1940s, I can look 1970s hippie-chic, or sometimes I’ll pull that ’80s Brooklyn hip-hop kid with the door-knocker earrings.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.