In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end ….

Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future..

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it..

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'..

There might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now..

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete way….

The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid furthe….

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life..

The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist han….

The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress'. . . . The assumption is that the future will honour this relationsh….

The whole life of Demosthenes... leaves the impression of a melancholy state of things, and of the brazen insolence of wickedness. A particularly str….

The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellec….

To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways an….

True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much..

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another..

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity..

History is still in large measure poetry to me..