Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is considered one of the greatest of the German idealist philosophers. He was born at Stuttgart, August 27, 1770. Hegel studied theology at Tbingen, where during his studies he outlined his system with its emphasis on reason rather than the Romantic intuitionism. Hegel had been appointed to an extraordinary professorship at Jena, but the Napoleonic victory there (1806) closed the University and Hegel became editor of a Bamburg newspaper. From 1808 to 1816, he had master of a Nuremberg school, where he instructed the unfortunate boys in his philosophical systems. In his second great work, The Science of Logic (1812, 1816), he set out his famous dialectical Logic. Hegel's last work was written in Heidelberg, where Hegel became professor in 1816. In 1818 he succeeded Fichte in Berlin and until his death in 1831 was virtually the dictator of German philosophical thinking.

Inspired by the French Revolution in youth, rejoicing with Napoleon in his victory over Prussia at Jena, Hegel's philosophy eventually turned him into a loyal supporter of that itarian state and a hater of democratic measures, particularly the English Reform Bill. His political philosophy is set out in The Philosophy of Right (1821), and his lecture notes on the History of Philosophy, Philosophy of History and of Art, the latter an important contribution to aesthetics, were published posthumously. Hegel died during a cholera epidemic in 1831. Hegel's philosophy is a rationalization of his early mysticism, stimulated by Christian theology.

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."

"Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights."

"What experience and history teach is this - that people and government never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

"Reason is the substance of the universe. The design of the world is absolutely rational."