I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History is shaped by the actions and decisions of individuals rather than a separate entity.
In this quote, Karl Marx emphasizes that history is not an independent force that acts on people, but rather a reflection of human activity and agency. He argues that history is created through the actions of real individuals who possess motivations and ambitions, highlighting the role of man in shaping historical events and outcomes.
Themes
HistoryMenAgencyActionsIndividuals
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on sociology, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of individual actions in historical contexts.
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It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
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Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
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To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
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Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
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Yet seldom do they fail of their seed, And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us.
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People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.
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We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.
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Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.
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It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
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