"‎Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship."

The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict’s garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on.

Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting

All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.

the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us...

History as a whole is the struggle between love and the inability to love, between love and the refusal to love.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real.

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive — and a few are enough to carry on.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.

Humanity is forever involved in two conflicting currents, the one tending towards unification, and the other towards the maintenance or restoration of diversity. As a result of the position of each period or culture in the system, as a result of the way it is facing, each thinks that only one of these two currents represents an advance, while the other appears to be the negation of the first. But we should be purblind if we said, as we might be tempted to do, that humanity is constantly unmaking what it makes. For, in different spheres and at different levels, both currents are in truth two aspects of the same process.

Lo que predico es, pues, hasta un cierto punto, la rebelión de la vida contra la ciencia, o más bien contra el gobierno de la ciencia. No para destruir la ciencia –eso sería un crimen de lesa humanidad–, sino para ponerla en su puesto, de manera que no pueda volver a salir de él. Hasta el presente toda la historia humana no ha sido más que una inmolación perpetua y sangrienta de millones de pobres seres humanos a una abstracción despiadada cualquiera: Dios, patria, poder el estado, honor nacional, derechos históricos, derechos jurídicos, libertad política, bien público.