It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
Revolutions do not go backward.
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
Nothing will stop us. The road to the stars is steep and dangerous. But we're not afraid . . . Space flights can't be stopped. This isn't the work of one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.
The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.
I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves.
Men live in history as never before …. we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.
[History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.
Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.
Men make history, but they can never know the history they are making.
We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?
By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.
Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
No matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy.
Political, social and economic realities are shaped by a historical process.
History works itself out in the living.
History is only very rarely the story of inevitabilities,” he says, “and it almost never appears in that form to its participants.
The two most far-reaching critical theories at the beginning of the latest phase of industrial society were those of Marx and Freud. Marx showed the moving powers and the conflicts in the social-historical process. Freud aimed at the critical uncovering of the inner conflicts. Both worked for the liberation of man, even though Marx's concept was more comprehensive and less time-bound than Freud's.
Men make their own history
Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.
Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.
History remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.
