Adam Weishaupt Quotes

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars; it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.

If the views I have expressed be right, we can think of our civilization evolving with the growth of knowledge from small wandering tribes to large settled law.

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

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.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

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

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

I think generationally, as human progress does its thing, we are constantly impressed by the upcoming generation.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

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

All history is man's efforts to realize ideals.

Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.

The deeper we trace the political influences in history, the more are we convinced that the "will to power" has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development of human social forms.

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

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power

I write to learn the flow of history.

Being in London has really taught me how important history is. Just having information of the past. It helps you predict the future, which is all we really have as, you know, humans.

By 1892, enlightenment had progressed to the point where the Salem trials were simply an embarrassing blot on the history of New England. They were a part of the past that was best forgotten: a reminder of how far the human race had come in two centuries.