Alexandre

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai V. Gogol

“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

“We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged”
― Heinrich Heine

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.”
― Émile Zola