Emile Durkheim Quotes

I think all of the secrets of the universe are revealed in history. We understand who we are by understanding where we've been and why we are the way we are, and where we come from.

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

If we compare the present time with former ages, we find that the same tendencies and desires have at all times governed states and peoples.

The general idea of history seems to be that it is the biography of a society…. History is to the common life of many what biography is to an individual.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

The historical method has revolutionized Political Economy, not by showing its laws to be false, but by proving that they are relative for the most part to a particular stage of civilization. This destroys their character as eternal laws, and strips them of much of their force and all their sanctity. In this way the historical method has rescued us from intellectual superstitions.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

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

We learn from history. That's what it's all about.

I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn't know what his contemporaries are.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.