Quotable quotes from E.H. Carr & Karl Marx

After reading and reflecting on Chin Peng's memoirs not too long after it was first published, I suddenly remembered what British historian E.H.Carr (1892-1982) and German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) once said in their writings.

Carr: Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests. ( in What is history?)

Marx: Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. (in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)