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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3380 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 10th Occasional Give Us a Quote from Your Recent Reading

dropped this on my profile a couple days ago

    Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte





lil  ·  3380 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
This is scarily true. From within the tradition, it is hard to decipher which parts of it are unhealthy and anti-human We think we might be springing ourselves from the past even as we reclaim it.
    So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.