Fernand Braudel

There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts.

— Fernand Braudel

There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance.

— Fernand Braudel

Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history.

— Fernand Braudel

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions,…

— Fernand Braudel

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

— Fernand Braudel

The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.

— Fernand Braudel

“When the [colonial] contact was violent, in fact, failure was more frequent than success. 'Colonialism' may have triumphed in the past: but…

— Fernand Braudel

History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.

— Fernand Braudel

For a century, the Arabs tribes gave Islam the first of these victories. Then the rough mountain peoples of North Africa, the…

— Fernand Braudel

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and…

— Fernand Braudel

The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call…

— Fernand Braudel

The companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of…

— Fernand Braudel

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

— Fernand Braudel

Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves little trace in history.

— Fernand Braudel

The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

— Fernand Braudel

Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.

— Fernand Braudel

For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,'…

— Fernand Braudel

“Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Civilization can persist through a series of economies.”

— Fernand Braudel