Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.
Interpretation
History teaches us that people and governments often fail to learn from past experiences.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argues that despite the lessons history provides, individuals and governments tend not to learn from these lessons due to the unique circumstances surrounding each period. He suggests that actions and decisions must be based on contemporary situations rather than historical precedents, highlighting a certain futility in expecting history to guide current behavior effectively.
In practice
In a discussion about political decisions, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of new contexts.
The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.
The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.
If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit, we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labour and trouble; their whole nature was nought else but their master—passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar.
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people's entry into the main current of world-events.
[H]owever weak our country may be, I hope we shall never sacrifice our liberties.
They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though
...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
If people become accustomed to lying, they will unconsciously commit every possible wrong deed. Before they can act wickedly, they must lie and once they begin to lie they will act wickedly without concern.
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
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