“World history is a court of judgment.”

When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.

The spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressive motion, in giving itself a new form.

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

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.

Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained.

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

I had no idea that history was being made. I was just tired of giving up.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

The only persons who really changed history are those who changed men’s thinking about themselves.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

Work hard, have fun and make history.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.