Selected passages from The Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant. A seminal work of history — 11 volumes spanning from the earliest civilizations through the Age of Napoleon.
Volume I: Our Oriental Heritage
“Economic history is the slow cyclical heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of naturally concentrating wealth and naturally explosive revolution”
“Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in the struggle for existence; it became a vice only when it survived the conditions that made it indispensable; a vice therefore is not an advanced form of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways.”
“Internal cooperation is the first law of external competition”
“Religion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or of chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness, and loneliness of men”
“History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved”
“This is the tragedy of almost every civilization — that its soul is in its faith, and it seldom survives philosophy.”
“If thou be powerful make thyself to be honored for knowledge and for gentleness . . . Beware of interruption, and of answering words with heat; put it from thee; control thyself.” — Ptah-hotep
“Civilization, like life, is a perpetual struggle with death. And as life maintains itself only by abandoning old, and recasting itself in younger and fresher forms, so civilization achieves a precarious survival by changing its habitat or its blood.”
“It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace, and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths.”
“Has the law progressed since Hammurabi, or only increased and multiplied?”
“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean”
“In the end, nothing is lost; for good or evil every event has effects forever.”
“For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.”
“Reality is never so clear-cut in its differences as the rubrics under which we dismember it for neat handling”
“It is in the nature of an empire to disintegrate soon, for the energy that created it disappears from those who inherit it, at the very time that its subject peoples are gathering strength to fight for their lost liberty”
Volume II: The Life of Greece
“Humanity, patient under every cataclysm, renews its hope, takes courage, and builds once more.”