| It will spark curiosity for other topics and books related to history. So much so that after reading this book I got the entire 11-tome Story of Civilization.
Also, it is VERY easy to read. Especially for such dense topics.
Flow: 5/5
Actionability: 4/5
Mindset: 5/5
Some of My Highlights:
- “Confucius replied: ‘With what then will you recompense kindness? Return good for doo, and for evil, justice.'”
- “That whereby man differs from the lower animals is little. Most people throw it away.”
- “How much of Plato’s Socrates was Socrates, and how much of it was Plato, e shall probably never know.”
- “‘Not long ago,’ said Voltaire, ‘a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous questions’ (alas, this is an untimely quotation!), ‘who was the greatest man – Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Someone answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.'”
- “Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe.”
- “Beauty has its rights as well as truth; and the Iliad is more important than the Trojan War.”
- “Perhaps you are a college graduate, and are ready, then, to begin your education.”
- “Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.”
- “Life without music, as Nietzsche said, would be a mistake.”
- “Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respected seek not happiness but greatness.”
- “Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.”
- “…we shall understand that each age and place calls for and needs certain brands of genius rather than others…”
- “As to happiness, no man can say; it is an elusive angel, destroyed by detection and seldom amenable to measurement. Presumably it depends first upon health, secondly upon love, and thirdly upon wealth.”
- “Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we become human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place mankind today, with all its detectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before.”
- “Perhaps some such plan would alleviate the pain inflicted by some of the textbooks of history used in our colleges and schools.
- “Life, said Buddha, is full of suffering; it can be made bearable only by doing no injury to any living thing, and speaking no evil of any man – or woman either.”
- “‘Why are you sad?’ the visitor asked. ‘Don’t you know,’ answered Brandes, ‘that this is the anniversary of the greatest blunder in history – the assassination of Caesar?'”
- “There is no surety that the future is not theirs.”
- “It was gunpowder that turned war from a gentleman’s game, occasionally fatal, to a form of standardized mass destruction, a mode of removing from the earth, with a few minutes’ bombardments, the work of a hundred thousand artists’ hands laboring for three centuries.”
- “Nothing is new in China, democracy least of all.”
- “Napoleon remarked that the Bourbons might have preserved themselves, and prevented the French Revolution, by maintaining a governmental monopoly of ink.”
- “Cast here upon this petty earth, no longer the center of things but an incident, forced to realize that humanity is an interlude in biology, biology an interlude in geology (as any earthquake will remind us), and geology and interlude in astronomy, man was left to shift and think for himself.”
- “…and Voltaire might say, ‘I have no scepter, but I have a pen.'”
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