Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionarizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes, in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.

From Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, New York: International Publishers, 1963 (first published in 1852), pp. 15-16.

Addendum I (January 16, 2002)

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave. A vast chorus of long-gone ancients constitutes a not-so-silent majority whose legacy has what may be the most dramatic effect of all on our vision of reality.

From Howard Bloom’s Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, New York: Wiley, 2000, p. 77.

Addendum II (September 29, 2002)

The quote from The Eighteenth Brumaire has served as the motto for my Residua for a couple of decades at least. Minus the first and the last sentence, that is. It is a good motto, too. However, today I decided to scrap it. The quote from One Thousand Nights and One Night, which has accompanied this one since the 1996 publication of my book, has gradually supplanted it in my own mind. When I give my book to someone, or when I invite someone to visit the Residua website, I do so in the spirit of the new motto rather than the old one. The incongruity of the two mottos was pleasing for a number of years, but not any longer.