Heinrich Heine Quotes

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

I have this feeling that as time goes on, we're not getting any more civilized, and we should be. We're still running around like the days of Genghis Khan. There are so many important, better things to do and we need to encourage people to reach into the brighter side of humanity and not encourage people to continue to glorify the darker side.

We have come to Earth in this great season in the long history of mankind. It is a marvelous age - the best of all.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

While the association and its founders and its founders most sincerely appreciate the splendid elements and achievements of the old-time Indian culture and the methods by which early conditions were met, it realizes most keenly the inefficacy of these methods in meeting the conditions of modern times.

Civilizations are a matter of the mind.

Solving new problems is what keeps us moving forward as individuals and as a society.

An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next

Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also.

Every generation of Muslims should be permitted to solve their own problems, guided but unhampered by the work of its predecessors.

Science is a progressive activity. The outstanding peculiarity of man is that he stumbled onto the possibility of progressive activities. Such progress, the accumulation of experience from generation to generation, depended first on the development of language, then of writing and finally of printing. These allowed the accumulation of tradition and of knowledge, of the whole aura of cultural inheritance that surrounds us. This has so conditioned our existence that it is almost impossible for us to stop and examine the nature of our culture. We accept it as we accept the air we breathe; we are as unconscious of our culture as a fish, presumably, is of water.

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

… ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.

I believe history of humankind has always faced challenges. I don't think that any other period in history was less problematic then the one in which we live.

Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.