The Versaillais entered Paris in 1871. They never left . (Journal – 1962 – René Fallet)
This is the painful path that you consider to be the road to defeat, taking into account only those who have traveled it to date; I, however, who consider the procession of those who will come, call it the road to salvation. (Maximus of Tyre)
In Shakespearean tragedy, hope sometimes takes the form of a cry rising from the pit, a cry addressed to whoever can see the dawn breaking: “Guards, how fares the night?” The anarchist, guardian of his own dreams, sometimes addresses this question to himself. (Freddy Gomez)
The historian’s job, which involves gathering and synthesizing tangible sources, easily leads to ignoring what has not fully come to pass, and thus to underestimating the innovative capacity of utopias produced in revolutionary periods. (Éric Aunoble)
The more the empire oligarchy that prides itself on democracy spreads and globalizes as the political model of the new era, the more democracy as a form of collective life becomes an abstraction of which no one can say where it begins or ends, or even if it exists anywhere at all. (…)
Already appearing irreversible are the transformations in terms of policing, control, management and surveillance that affect the very nature of power, which has become increasingly alien to any democratic spirit.
As we move towards anonymous autocracies that are served with varying degrees of zeal and dignity by representatives elected by the people, there is a growing awareness of an increasingly blatant discrepancy between words, actions and reality; between what a democracy should or could ideally be and the increasingly authoritarian and alien forms that are taking its place. (Curnier)
History advances along multiple paths (or tramples on them or goes back to its beginning), along as many paths as we do not know and which are at work before our eyes without us knowing how to see them, under our feet without us knowing how to feel them, under our thoughts without being able to imagine them. (Curnier)
The catastrophe would be for things to continue ‘going along like this’. This is not what will happen, but the state of affairs at any given moment. (Benjamin)
The historic mission of the bourgeoisie is the creation of a modern ‘national’ state; but the historic task of the proletariat is to abolish this state as a political form of capitalism. (Rosa Luxembourg)
Most tyrants were first captains and generals to the people, under the pretext of avenging or defending their freedom. As Tacitus said, “To overthrow the present government, they take the freedom of the people as a pretext, and when the government is overthrown, they themselves then oppress that freedom for which they had fought.” (Edward Sexby)
When tyranny is established, all that is base adheres, all that is dishonest profits, and all that is mediocre remains silent. (Anonymous)
In the order established by and on money, the tougher the elite, the more its triviality is revealed; the more it becomes commonplace, the more it spreads and degrades. (Accardo)
The mistake is to make an all too simplistic equivalence between the power of a given established order and the quantity of weapons it believes it has at its disposal. Any power can only last as long as the legitimacy of its own “worldview” on the society it claims to embody and which it will have, for a time at least and at least partially, shared with it, can last. (Anonymous)
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
Rebonds :
- Quotes notebook: History/Historiosophy No. 22
- Quotes notebook: History/Historiosophy No. 24 (Coming soon)