„The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship.“

Quelle: Quotes from secondary sources, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, 1895, P. 230.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Kontext: 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. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.

Section 9
The True Believer (1951), Part One: The Appeal of Mass Movements

Quelle: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 27

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Quelle: Sentimental Education (1869), Pt. 1, Ch. 4; the most famous portion of this statement is "Exuberance is better than taste..." [Mieux vaut l'exubérance que le goût.]

Preface, 1928
The Story of San Michele (1929)

"Tribute to Country Lawyers: A Review", 30 A.B.A Journal 139 (1944)

Quelle: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 73.

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1980/milosz-lecture-en.html (8 December 1980)

Comments on a court case in The Indian Opinion (25 March 1905)
1900s

Preguntaréis ¿por qué su poesía
no nos habla del sueño, de las hojas,
de los grandes volcanes de su país natal?<p>Venid a ver la sangre por las calles,
venid a ver
la sangre por las calles,
venid a ver la sangre
por las calles!
Explico Algunos Cosas (I'm Explaining a Few Things or I Explain a Few Things), Tercera Residencia (Third Residence), IV, stanza 9.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
You will ask: why does your poetry
not speak to us of of sleep, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of your native land?<p>Come and se the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

Quelle: The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), p. 37
Kontext: People think that they have no right to judge a fact — all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact.

22 February 1748
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Quelle: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 255)

"Introduction to 'We're Losing Contact, Captain'" (p.353)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Variant translation: Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.
Quelle: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVII.

"The Dead Heart"
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)