Historical Development Quotes

For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.

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.

In the institution of societies, mankind in all probability thought father of redressing the evils, which they had experienced, than of procuring the several advantages resulting from laws, from commerce, from the arts and sciences, and from all those other improvements so frequently mentioned in history.

Until 1847 Switzerland remained a pure Confederation of States, that is to say, she took five and a half centuries to make the step which the United States achieved at once.

On the stage on which we are observing it, — Universal History — Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality.

All religions undergo historical face lifts.

History is the greatest of dialecticians.

The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

History is the record of human progress, a record of the struggle of the advancement of the human mind, of the human spirit, towards some known or unknown objective.

If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

Despite the unquestionable greatness of the Anglo-Saxon genius, it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

You must read history forward and not backward.

Rome wasn't built in A.D.

The first organization structure in the modern West was laid down in the canon law of the Catholic Church eight hundred years ago.

Man is a history—making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

Nothing would be more profitable to us than a right history of mankind.

The founding generation would be amazed. It would be surprised. I think it would be very impressed by what has happened since then in terms of our exploding population; in terms of the success of this country economically and otherwise.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

While modern changes were intrinsic to Western historical development, they were largely seen by Muslims as alien and enforced.

All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.