William > William's Quotes

“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
― HEGEL

“The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
― Georg Hegel

“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

“An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.”
― Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice

“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.”
― Leon Trotsky

“Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having barbarian souls.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus