End Of History Quotes

“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Those in the System, would like us to share their belief that all the changes [we are witnessing] are not connected: they are simply anomalies, isolated symptoms to be treated or preferably ignored, before the all-powerful Western capitalist patriarchal model goes on to ever greater heights and grander ejaculations. Most are numb to it, caught in fear, denial or resistance.

But we, Burning Woman, know this process intimately. Amongst Burning Women and Men, there is a fierce, quiet knowing that these are both the death pangs of the old, and the birthing pangs of the new.”
― Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

“I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.”
― Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

“Οι μεγάλες αφηγήσεις, οι εξιστορήσεις των μεγάλων στιγμών της ανθρωπότητας, των ριζοσπαστικών αλλαγών, των αλμάτων του πολιτικού και του πολιτιστικού προς τα εμπρός είναι εχθρικές προς τη σημερινή κατάσταση του κόσμου. Η αδιαφορία συναγωνίζεται την έλλειψη παιδείας· και τα δύο μαζί πιστοποιούν ότι η «ιστορία τελείωσε», όχι ως γεγονός αλλά ως συνειδητή απόφαση των κυρίαρχων του κόσμου μας.”
― Γιώργος Μαργαρίτης, Η Ρωσική Επανάσταση: Μια σύντομη ιστορία

“The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History

“See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last man (London: Penguin, 1993). Note the often-overlooked second part where Fukuyama criticizes the end of history as leading to the last man.”
― Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche's Great Politics

“You wanted a more interesting world… Maybe I’m growing up quickly. Maybe I’m better than you planned… Maybe I’m just showing you that your world was interesting enough all the time, all on its own. And now I’m punishing you.”
― Warren Ellis, Injection, Vol. 1

“History here is always a comedy, and not a tragedy: the tragic is before or after, and in any case outside of, temporal life; this life itself realizes a program fixed beforehand and therefore, taken in itself, has neither any meaning nor any value.”
― Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit