This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The history of past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Experience | History | Principles | Teach |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
Consciousness | Freedom | History | Progress | World |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of mind is its own act. Mind is only what it does, and its act is to make itself the object of its own consciousness. In history its act is to gain consciousness of itself as mind, to apprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself.
Consciousness | History | Mind | Object |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What experience and history teach is... that people and government have never learned anything from history.
Experience | Government | History | People | Teach | Government |
Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle... If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Agitation | Freedom | History | Liberty | Men | Progress | Struggle |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The history of the world begins with its general aim, the realization of the idea of spirit, only in an implicit form, that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one... This vast congeries of volitions, interest and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it.
Consciousness | History | Impulse | Instinct | Means | Nature | Object | Spirit | World |
The period of time covered by history is far too short to allow any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such Progress since Caesar’s time (less than 20th centuries ago) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the past exists at the present moment.
Absurd | Barbarism | Discussion | Evolution | History | Past | Present | Progress | Rest | Sense | Time |
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science; and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world... It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality.
Absolute | Education | History | Impulse | Meaning | Mind | Philosophy | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Science | Spirit | Unity | World |
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
I wonder whether even in the past total victory was not really an illusion from the standpoint of the victors. In a sense, there is not total victory short of genocide, unless it be a victory over the minds of men. But the total military victories are rarely victories over the minds of men.
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
For every civilization or every period of history it is true today: show me what kind of god you have and I will tell you what kind of humanity you possess.
The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself.
Action | Contrast | Eternity | Existence | Future | History | Hope | Imagination | Mind | Past | Time | Universe | Will |
The memorable events of history are the visible effects of invisible changes in human thought.
The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections… Every time a man finds his heart is troubled, that he is not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth.
God | Heart | History | Life | Life | Man | Thought | Time | Truth | Thought |
Harvey Cox, fully Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr.
God has given man a thrilling responsibility for this world. But man has not fulfilled his assignment. God has placed the tiller of history in man’s hand, but man has gone to his hammock and let the winds and tides sweep his ship along.