Historical quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship."
"I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself"
"I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement."
"World dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries ... [and] when these federation of republics have finally grown into a world union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state."
"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside historical — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Nobody respects a country with a poor army, but everybody respects a country with a good army. I raise my toast to the Finnish army"
"Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour."
"Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed"
"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
"Democracy is the road to socialism."
"All oppression creates a state of war."
"To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity."
"I will give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective 'Jewish.' A Nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then, if you add to that the word 'Jewish' you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation."
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."
"We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself."
"Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat."
"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt."
"Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State."
"What I did that was new was to prove that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historical phases in the development of production; that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and that dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
"Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them."
"The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice."
"The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion."
"The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around."
"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
