Thanks to @ProfSteveKeen and Karl Marx:
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.
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.
-- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
-- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
I like this (a lot!) because it so poetically conveys the physical concept of inertia in human systems, ideas that matter for casting 21st c. climate scenarios. Despite our efforts, we cannot shed the past, even while it catapults us into a hotter, more challenging future.
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