Jacob Burckhardt Quotes

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further movement and because they are and will be innovators per se; secondly, because the forces aroused or subdued by them can be employed only through further acts ...

The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress' ... The assumption is that the future will honour this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.

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

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 and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions.

The fates of people and of states, of entire civilizations, can depend on whether an extraordinary person can bring forth the proper strength of soul and action. Normal minds and spirits, no matter how numerous, cannot replace such a person.

The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.

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 to the whole.

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

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 intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.

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.