History supplies little beyond a list of those who have accommodated themselves with the property of others. – Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play. РR̩gis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?

The idea of history in any age, like the idea of property, or of progress, is an unstable compound; it is put together as needed, by historians or by philosophers, out of the irreconcilable opinions of men. – F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution