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.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
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