“Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.”

Source: Winter's Tale

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Analysis of Oppression (1955), p. 141
Context: The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.

Ils faisaient à autrui ce qu'ils ne voulaient pas qu'on leur fît, principe immoral sur lequel repose tout l’art de la guerre.
Tr. Walter James Miller (1978)
Variant: They did unto others what they would not have others do unto them, an immoral principle that is the basic premise of the art of war.
Source: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Ch. X: One Enemy v. Twenty-five Millions of Friends (Charles Scribner's Sons "Uniform Edition", 1890, p. 50)

Maxim 428, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not an irretrievable plunge into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which fails to start from resignation in regard to knowledge is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the universe.

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Variant: A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Source: Lolita

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)
Context: I conclude by saying that each of us must keep faith in the future. Let us not despair. Let us realize that as we struggle for justice and freedom, we have cosmic companionship. This is the long faith of the Hebraic-Christian tradition: that God is not some Aristotelian Unmoved Mover who merely contemplates upon himself. He is not merely a self-knowing God, but an other-loving God forever working through history for the establishment of His kingdom.