History Of Ideas Quotes

“Indeed, as some historians observe, the changing relationships of readers to text over time can be seen as one index of the history of thought.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“If the attitude of many non-Catholic modern philosophers toward Catholic thought could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be: It has been tried, it has produced its definitive results, which have been found lacking, and now its time is past”
― Gregory B. Sadler

“Histories of morality are rarely written in order to inform the reader.”
― John Gray

“we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook of the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one of the 'great books' of the nineteenth century—one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known to the educated public.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“the historian treats ideas seriously and does not regard them as completely subservient to events and possessing no life of their own (for in that case there would be no point in studying them), but he does not believe that they can endure from one generation to another without some change of meaning.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“intellectual trends that originate with a given person have a prehistory of their own”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“One of the recurring themes in the history of colonial repression is the way in which the threat of real or imagined violence towards white women became a symbol [...] European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure: when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations [...] the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused, White women provided a symbol of the most vulnerable property known to white man, and it was to be protected from the ever-encroaching black man at all costs.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“European women's "sexual fear" appears to arise in special circumstances of unequal power structures at times of particular political pressure: when the dominant power group perceives itself as threatened and vulnerable. Protecting the virtue of white women was the pretext for instituting draconian measures against indigenous populations [...] the actual level of rape and sexual assault bore no relation to the hysteria that the subject aroused.”
― Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History

“Despite the fact that [...] 71% of murders related to extremism in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of far-right or white-supremacist movements, federal authorities have maintained a sustained myopia toward white terror.”
― Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

“History is not written by those who make the History, but by those who writes the History!”
― Beta Metani'Marashi

“Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation.”
― Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering

“An artist's legacy is not just a body of work; it is the archaeology of their lives and of life itself.”
― Stewart Stafford