Quote by Ibn Khaldun: “He who finds a new path is a pathfinder, even if the trail has to be found again by others.”

The person who breaks new ground in thought or action creates something genuinely valuable, even if what they discover gets lost and has to be rediscovered later. Pioneering matters in itself — it is not negated by the fact that the path was overgrown afterward.

Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah in 1377 while in isolation at a castle in what is now Algeria, following years of turbulent involvement in North African and Iberian politics. The Black Death had recently decimated the Mediterranean world, and he was attempting to understand the rise and fall of civilisations scientifically.

Tunisian historian and sociologist born in 1332 in Tunis, widely regarded as a founder of the modern disciplines of historiography, sociology, and economics. His Muqaddimah introduced a theory of social cohesion and historical cycles that remains influential today.