Baruch Spinoza Quotes on Time

Quotes

• “He was in a certain sense the first Zionist of the last three hundred years, [...] Through keen insight into Jewish and world history he prophesied the rebirth of the State of Israel .”

  G - L | David Ben-Gurion , 1953. As quoted in Daniel B. Schwartz, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image . (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012)

• “Leibniz's doctrine is an evolutionary doctrine. It is not the same thing with Spinoza. Spinoza has no sense of change and evolution. He has no sense of history.”

  A - F | Isaiah Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo , Conversations with Isaiah Berlin . (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991)

• “Hegel's History of Philosophy presents French materialism as the realization of Spinozistic Substance , which in any case is more comprehensible than the "French school of Spinoza."”

  M - R | Karl Marx , Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society [original in German]

• “From the great creations of Spinoza, as from distant stars, light takes several centuries to reach us. Only the psychology of the future will be able to realize the ideas of Spinoza.”

  S - Z | Lev Vygotsky , in his collected notebooks [original in Russian] [ specific citation needed ]

• “David A. Duquette, Hegel's History of Philosophy: New Interpretations . (State University of New York Press, 2002)”

  A - F

• “Heinrich Heine , On the History of Philosophy and Religion and Other Writings [original in German]”

  G - L

• “Susan Jacoby , Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016)”

  G - L

• “Goethe —not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, [...] He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, [...]”

  M - R | Friedrich Nietzsche , Twilights of Idols (1888), "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 49.

• “What can be said is that Spinoza is, without question, one of history's most eloquent proponents of a secular, democratic society and the strongest advocate for freedom and toleration in the early modern period.”

  Steven Nadler | Steven Nadler , A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)

• “Let him who wishes weep bitter tears because history moves ahead so perplexingly: two steps forward, one step back. But tears are of no avail. It is necessary according to Spinoza's advice, not to laugh, not to weep, but to understand!”

  S - Z | Leon Trotsky , I Stake My Life! (February 1937). Trotsky's address to the N.Y. Hippodrome Meeting was delivered by telephone from Mexico City for the opening event of the Dewey Commission on the Mosco

• “Jason M. Wirth , The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003)”

  S - Z