Hermann Broch Quotes

Life is beautiful but people are crazy.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system. -- With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature [us] will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

The hallmark of our times is change and acceleration, but we have to provide the history.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

History is a record of the gradual negation of man’s original bestiality by the evolution of his humanity.

Nobody can stop the progress of history.

Insanity is a very high art form. If everyone was insane, I wouldn't be here!

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

The world is evolving.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature.

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made 'knowledge and understanding' the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings.

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

History is a record of exploded ideas.

Lots of people say if you dredge too much stuff up, you'll go crazy - "You'll go insane!" But for a comedian, insanity is not a problem. It's a goal.

Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.

Men are mad and gods are madder, she told the grass, and the grass murmured its agreement.