Historical Determinism Quotes

“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere— an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers— and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people— from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God

“There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of The Herd: Or, Procrustes at Large

“The fanatic loathes an open-ended situation. Perhaps he does not acknowledge such situation. He always has an urgent need to know what the 'bottom line' is, what the inevitable conclusion is, when we will finally 'come full circle.' Yet history, including the private history of each of us, is usually not a circle but a line: a winding line with retreats and bends, which sometimes changes course and intersects with itself and occasionally draws loops, but nevertheless, a line and not a circle. Being immune to fanaticism entails, among other things, a willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled. A readiness to live with questions and choices whose resolutions hide far beyond the hazy horizon.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“There are no meaningless moments or deeds in history,' [Tomasz] Burek wrote in an influential text ('On the Razor's Edge') published in 1968, 'history happens at every moment, [and] is determined in every gesture of every individual life. This sense that we live ... on the razor's edge, totally and ruthlessly, believing that everything about us is always the result of human choice and the drive to humanity within each person - this is not theology or historical determinism but a realistic approach.”
― Aurelian Craiutu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes