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“It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the mortal danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides, which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radically “nonconformist” Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all (even the “sublimated” given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into inactive anarchy and disappearing. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a “permanent revolution” that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of the concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

“You “shall” become a child again, and therefore, or to that end, you shall begin by being able to and by willing to understand the words that are as if directed at a child, and which every child understands—you shall understand the words as a child understands them: “You shall.” The child never asks about reasons; the child does not dare do so, neither does the child need to—and the one corresponds to the other, for precisely because the child does not dare do so, neither does it need to ask about reasons; because for the child it is reason enough that it shall—indeed, all reasons together would not be reason enough to the child to the degree that this is. And the child never says, “I cannot.” The child does not dare do so, and neither is it true; the one corresponds precisely to the other—for precisely because the child does not dare say, “I cannot,” it is not therefore true that it cannot, and it therefore turns out that the truth is that it can do it, for it is impossible to be unable to do it when one does not dare do otherwise: nothing is more certain—as long as it is certain that one does not dare do otherwise. And the child never looks for an evasion or an excuse, for the child understands the frightful truth that there is no evasion or excuse, there is no hiding place, neither in heaven nor on earth, neither in the parlor nor in the garden, where it could hide from this “You shall.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses