Quote:
Originally Posted by bfisher
Hegel says somewhere that that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: "Once as tragedy, and again as farce."
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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Non-native speaker comprehension question: If things
recur twice, doesn't that mean they
happen three times?
If so, the translation of the Marx quote is wrong; in the German original Marx uses the verb
sich ereignen, which means
occur or
happen.
But perhaps I don't get the meaning of
recur right, so please enlighten me.
I'm not trying to nitpick, but by a weird coincidence I read someone misquoting Marx in German to the same effect just five minutes ago, so I'm curious.