For love of history. A massive quote dump from some of the books I have been reading lately. Hope someone else will enjoy them or, even better, enjoy the books!
How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
The ago old platonic fallacy equates knowledge with virtue.
The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were now unobtainable by readers of the dark ages. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision. Instead he apprehended similarities, imbalances; types and paradigms; parallels and symbols. It was a world, not of thoughts, but of images.
To be Irish is to know, that in the end, the world will break your heart.
The Irish are the only people who can not be helped by psychoanalysis.”
–attributed to Sigmund Freud
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II by Edward Gibbon
“When a public quarrel is envenomed by private injuries, a blow that isn’t mortal or decisive can be productive only of a short truce which allows the unsuccessful compeditent to sharpen his arms for a new encounter.”
“…but experience has proved the distinction of active and passive courage. The fanatic who endures without a groan the torture of the rack or the state would tremble and fly before the face of an armed enemy.”
The Reformation (The Story of Civilization, volume 6) by Will Durant
“Your emphasis on faith as against works was ruinous and led to a religions who’s coldness of heart concealed behind the piety of it’s phrases.
For a hundred years charity almost died in the centers of your victory.
You destroyed nearly all the schools we had established, and you weakened to the verge of death the universities that the Church had created and developed.
Your own leaders admit that your disruption of the faith led to a dangerous deterioration of morals both in Germany and England.
You let loose a chaos of individualism in morals, philosophy, industry, and government.
You took all the joy and beauty out of religion and filled it with demonology and terror.
You condemned the masses of mankind to damnation as ‘reprobates,’ and consoled an insolent few with the pride of ‘election’ and salvation.
You stifled the growth of art, and wherever you triumphed classical studies withered.
You expropriated Church property to give it to the state and the rich, but you left the poor poorer than before, and added contempt to misery.
You condoned usury and capitalism but deprived the workers of restful holidays a merciful church had given them.
You rejected the papacy only to exalt the state.
You gave to selfish princes the right to determine the religion of their subjects and to use religions as a sanction for their wars.
You divided nation against nation, and many a nation and city against itself.
You wrecked the international moral checks on national powers, and created a chaos of warring national states.
You denied the authority of a church founded on your own admission by the son of God but you sanctioned absolute monarchy and exulted the divine right of kings.
Unwittingly you destroyed the power of the word which is the only alternative to the power of money or the sword.
You claimed the right of private judgment, but you denied it to others as soon as you could…
Meanwhile see what your private judgment has lead too. Every man becomes a pope, and judges the doctrines of religion before he is old enough to comprehend the functions of religion in society and morals and the need of the people for a religious faith.
A kind of dis-integrative mania, unhindered by any integrative authority, throws your followers into such absurd and violent disputes that men begin to doubt all religion, and Christianity itself would be dissolved and men would be left spiritually naked in the face of death were it not that the Church stands firm amid all the fluctuations of opinion and argument…
The world is supported by four things. The learning of the wise. The Valor of the Brave. The Justice of the Great. The prayers of the good.
A supreme and unchangeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.”
“Men would try again to capture the spirit of Erasmus, and the Renaissance, and renew the long slow labor of enlightenment.
“Wherever Protestantism Advanced scholarship declined.”
“For men are, by nature, unequal and can be induced to share their goods and fortunes only by a vital and common danger.”
“The communism that was set up was a war economy as, perhaps, all strict communism must be.”
“Internal liberty varies with external security and communism breaks with the tension of peace.”
œA nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean
“Liberalism is a luxury of security and peace.”
“Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes. It is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.”
Children were now luxuries which only the poor could afford.
“No great nation is ever conquered until it has destroyed itself.
“The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.”
“…eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.
œFor barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility”
“Man will sacrifice anything but appetite for health.”
“Wisdom seems always a reincarnation, or echo, since it remains the same through a thousand varieties and generations of error.”
“When the myth dies, only force is free.”
“Time is the greatest vandal of them all.”
“Energy directed at a unifying will is almost the definition of genius.”