“I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.”

Source: Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947, 1948, p. 8 as cited in: Susanne Schätzle (2004) Migration und Integration in Deutschland. p. 10
Context: Man's history is the story of his wanderings. Some epochs of the remote past have frequently been called 'periods of great migrations.' This terminology presumes that at other times migratory movements were at a standstill, especially in the case of a so-called 'sedentary' people. Every epoch is a period of "great migrations".

Source: Empire novels (1950–1952), Pebble in the Sky (1950), Chapter 1 "Between One Footsep and the Next" (p. 6)

Source: Go Set a Watchman

Vivian, ch. 7; Tales and Novels, vol. 8, p. 80.

Interview in Le Monde (1981), as quoted in "A short biography of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994)" by Patrick Chastenet, as translated by Lesley Graham http://www.ellul.org/bio_e1.html

Pt. I, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)

after 1967 - posthumous
Source: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 32 note 1.

Ten Sermons of Religion (1853), III : Of Justice and the Conscience https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ten_Sermons_of_Religion/Of_Justice_and_the_Conscience
Context: The facts of man's history do not fully represent the faculties of his nature as the history of matter represents the qualities of matter. Man, though finite, is indefinitely progressive, continually unfolding the qualities of his nature; his history, therefore, is not the whole book of man, but only the portion thereof which has been opened and publicly read. So the history of man never completely represents his nature; and a law derived merely from the facts of observation by no means describes the normal rule of action which belongs to his nature. The laws of matter are known to us because they are kept; there the ideal and actual are the same; but man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than what he has come up to, — an ideal of nature which shames his actual of history. Observation and reflection only give us the actual of morals; conscience, by gradual and successive intuition, presents us the ideal of morals.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)