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

- Jacob Burckhardt

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

- Jacob Burckhardt

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…

- Jacob Burckhardt

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

- Jacob Burckhardt

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

- Jacob Burckhardt

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

- Jacob Burckhardt

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 …

- Jacob Burckhardt

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…

- Jacob Burckhardt

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

- Jacob Burckhardt