Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
History
& Civilization
- “It’s a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...
It’s really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a
barbarian.”
William
Dean Howells, The
Rise of Silas Lapham
Ludwig von Mises: "The essential characteristic of
Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations
of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West,
from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is
essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the
officeholders."
- Lucian
(A.D. 120-200): "The historian should be fearless and
incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the
poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor
affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor
deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He
should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and
acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should
state the facts as they really occurred."
- Will
Durant, Life Magazine,18 October, 1963:
"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from
people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while
on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write
poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened
on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore
the banks for the river."
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom:
"As is so often true, the nature of our civilization has been
seen more clearly by its enemies than by most of its friends: 'the perennial
Western malady, the revolt of the individual against the species,' as that
nineteenth-century totalitarian, Auguste Comte, has described it, was indeed the force
which built our civilization. What the nineteenth century added to the individualism of
the preceding period was merely to make all classes conscious of freedom, to develop
systematically and continuously what had grown in a haphazard and patchy manner, and to
spread it from England and Holland over most of the European continent.
"The result of this growth surpassed all expectations. Wherever the barriers to the
free exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever
widening ranges of desire. And while the rising standard soon led to the discovery of very
dark spots in society, spots which men were no longer willing to tolerate, there was
probably no class that did not substantially benefit from the general advance."
- Sir
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended
from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the
historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she
contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings...
"After a diligent inquiry, I can discern four principal causes
for the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a
thousand years. I. The injuries of time and nature. II. The hostile attacks of the
barbarians and Christians. III. The use and abuse of materials. And IV. The domestic
quarrels of the Romans... "It is scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries
should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a
slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were
gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the
military spirit evaporated."
- Voltaire:
"History is but the register of human crimes and misfortunes."
- Sir
Isaiah Berlin, Winston Churchill in 1940: "Churchill ...
does not fear the future... But whereas Roosevelt, like all great innovators, had a
half-conscious premonitory awareness of the coming shape of a society ... Churchill, for
all his extrovert air, looks within, and his strongest sense is the
sense of the past... The clear, brightly coloured vision of history, in terms which
he conceived both the present and the future, is the inexhaustible source from which he
draws the primary stuff out of which his universe is so solidly built, so richly and
elaborately ornamented. So firm and so embracing an edifice could not be constructed by
anyone liable to react and respond like a sensitive instrument to the perpetually changing
moods and directions of other persons or institutions or peoples. And, indeed, Churchill's
strength ... he does not reflect a contemporary social or moral world in an intense and
concentrated fashion; rather he creates one of such power and coherence that it becomes
reality and alters the external world by being imposed on it with irresistible force. As
his history of the war shows, he has an immense capacity for absorbing facts, but they
emerge transformed by the categories which he powerfully imposes on the raw material into
something which he can use to build his own massive, simply,
impregnably fortified inner world... Churchill is acquainted with darkness as well
as light. Like all inhabitants and even transient visitors of inner worlds, he gives evidence of seasons of agonized brooding and slow recovery. Roosevelt might have spoken of sweat and blood, but when Churchill offered
his people tears, he spoke a word which might have been uttered by Lincoln..."
- President
Ronald Reagan, Jan. 20, 1984: "I'm convinced that in 1980 America faced
one of those historic choices that come to a nation only a few times in a century. We
could continue our decline, perhaps comforting ourselves by calling it inevitable; or we
could realize that there is no such thing as inevitable, and choose instead to make a new
beginning."
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): "History is the version of past
events that people have decided to agree upon."
- Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965): "History is written by
the victors." "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
- Will Durant (1885-1981): "One of the lessons of history is that
nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say."
- Abba Eban (1915- ): "History teaches us that men and nations behave
wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
- Henry Ford (1863-1947): "History is more or less bunk."
- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794): "History is little more than the register
of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831): "We learn from history
that man can never learn anything from history." "The history of the world is
none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."
- Robert Heinlein (1907-1988): "A generation which ignores history has
no past and no future."
- Aldous Huxley: "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of
history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
- Thomas Jefferson: "History, in general, only informs
us of what bad government is."
- Ted Koppel: "History is a tool used by politicians to justify their
intentions."
- Leonard Louis Levinson: "History is the short trudge from Adam to
Atom."
- Abraham Lincoln: "We cannot escape history."
- George Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned
to repeat it."
- Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859): "The men who make history have
not time to write it."
- H.G. Wells (1866-1946): "Human history becomes more and more a race
between education and catastrophe."
- Orson
Welles:
“If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat,
because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.”
- John Buchan: "You think that a wall as solid as the earth
separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of
glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn."
- James Fenimore Cooper: "If we would have civilization and the
exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must
have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the
rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves."
- Ludwig von Mises: "If history could teach us anything, it
would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization."
- Ayn Rand: "Civilization is the progress toward a society of
privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
- Robert M. Hutchins on Alfred North Whitehead: "Whitehead
once said: 'It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by copybooks and by eminent
people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of
what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization
advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without
thinking about them.' In mathematics, 'not thinking of what we are doing' is,
Whitehead points out, the essence of abstraction, the importance of which lies in the fact
that it is only by abstracting that we can form ideas of the universe."
- Sarah Hinze, Coming From The Light: "Dr. Wayne
Dyer, referring to the research of Sir Aldous Huxley, said: 'Aldous Huxley in The
Perennial Philosophy studied every age and every civilization and found there were
three factors that were a part of every human age and every civilization that ever
existed. These were civilizations that never had any contact with each other at all;
primitive tribes, Buddhists, eastern philosophies, cave men, etc., they all believed three
things:
1. There is an infinite world beyond the world of the changing;
there is some kind of an existence that is in back of this physical world that we find
ourselves in and that we are awake in.
2. The second thing they all believed is that an infinite world is a
part of every human personality . . . that it is a part of every human being.
3. And the third thing they have all believed and that is a part of every culture is that the purpose of life and of being here is to discover God or to
discover that invisible world which we call God.'
- RFK, Day of Affirmation Address,
University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966: "Few will have the greatness to bend
history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of
all those acts will be written the history of this generation ... It is from
numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time
a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against
injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down
the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
- Ernst Toller, German playwright, 1935: "History is the
propaganda of the victors."
- Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History: "History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with
geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to
frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger and sex. But in a developed and complex civilization individuals are more
differentiated and unique than in a primitive society, and many situations contain
novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes,
reasoning spreads, the results are less predictable."
- Will & Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage:
"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... A nation is born stoic
and dies epicurean. At its cradle ... religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to
the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and
softens the nature of things, and gives to men courage to bear pain and hardship
patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they
do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned
their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If
victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of
the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil
and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought
and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to
doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing
delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end.
After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes."
- David
McCullough, historian: Commenting on
the surreal and poetic ending to the lives of John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, both dying, not only on the same day but, on the 50th anniversary of the
signing of the Declaration: "When he was lying there dying, thinking of Jefferson, the cannon and rifle
fire and firecrackers were all booming in the distance, celebrating the Declaration of
Independence. Now, if you -- if you did that in a movie, somebody would say, 'Oh, that's
too much. You know. Things like that don't happen in real life.' It did happen in real
life, again and again, through that whole amazing life."
- Albert Schweitzer: "Civilization can
only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind
independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it. A new public
opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing
one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial
influences which are at its disposal. The unnatural way of spreading ideas must be opposed
by the natural one, which goes from man to man and relies solely on the truth of the
thoughts and the hearer's receptiveness of new truth."
- John Adams (only 20 years old), Oct. 12, 1755: "All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to
change. Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If
we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and
spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they
have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects
their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place.
Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned
ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all
the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should
have established it in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into
debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians. England immediately upon
this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough
to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for
conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of
empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent
Gallics [the French], our people according to exactest computations, will in another
century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have
(I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the
mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe, will not be able to subdue
us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to
disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some
great men in each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each
others' influence and keep the country in equilibrio."
- Brooks Atkinson: "In every age 'the
good old days' were a myth. No one thought they were good at the time. For every
age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived throught
them."
- "Again and again, an
enlightened and strong-willed individual has
- pushed against the prevailing
trends and the prevailing wisdom
- to perform an act of courage that
has changed history."
-
-
Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson, Forbes, 5-7-07: “When I was
at Oxford studying
history 60 years ago the fashionable approach was to discount
individuals and stress the importance of forces and classes. Everything I've
learned since, reporting in the real world ... has proved how important outstanding
individuals are, for good and evil. This first became clear as I watched U.S. President
Harry Truman and Secretary of State General George Marshall implement the Marshall Plan,
which saved battered postwar Europe from destitution and the Soviets. I saw it again when two great men,
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and General Charles de Gaulle, rebuilt Germany and France into
powerful and influential nations after the shame and humiliations of World War II. Again and again, an enlightened and strong-willed individual has pushed
against the prevailing trends and the prevailing wisdom to perform an act of courage that
has changed history. Marshal Tito, leader of Yugoslavia, broke the monolithic mold of the Soviet empire. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore proved that a small nation
can make itself rich and significant--without great stores of natural resources--simply by
using its brains. Richard Nixon ended years of bitter hostility between the U.S. and China, forging relationships with China's leaders and inaugurating a
process that has led this giant nation into the world of enterprise, capitalism and
prosperity. And perhaps most impressive of all, Pope John Paul II, Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan joined to bring down the crumbling walls of the
Soviet empire, giving hundreds of millions of people the chance to enjoy freedom. In all
these cases individuals were of supreme importance. Without them the world today would be
a very different place.” Editor's note: Compare this to Gustavson's chapter
(above), The Individual In History.
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