The Story of Civilization Series - Will Durant

The Story of Civilization series by Will and Ariel Durant is a seminal work. I have nothing but praise for the thorough objective coverage of history in this 11 book, nearly 15,000 page behemoth of a series. The Durant's dedicated over four decades to carefully writing this Pulitzer-prize-winning series. Although it may take me a decade to get through it, I'm slowly trucking along.

"Economic history is the slow [cyclical] heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of naturally concentrating wealth and naturally explosive revolution"

"Internal cooperation is the first law of external competition"

"History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved"

"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."

"Reality is never so clear-cut in its differences as the rubrics under which we dismember it for neat handling"

"Has the law progressed since Hammurabi, or only increased and multiplied?"

"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."

"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 it's defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost"

"We think war less frequent today because we are conscious of the lucid intervals of peace, while history seems conscious only of the fevered crises of war."

"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 it's subject peoples are gathering strength to fight for their lost liberty"

"In the end, nothing is lost; for good or evil every event has effects forever."

"Almost everywhere [in early societies] the Earth was the Great Mother; our language, which is often the precipitate of primitive or unconscious beliefs, suggests to this day, a kinship metween matter (materia) and mother (mater)"

"This is the tragedy of almost every civilization -- that it's soul is in its faith, and it seldom survives philosophy"

"Official historians accompanied the Pharoahs on their expeditions, never saw their defeats, and recorded, or invented, the details of their victories; already the writing of history had become a cosmetic art

"Panta rei -- all things flow; only scholars never change"

"The Age of Metals (and of writing and civilization is a mere six thousand years appended to an Age of Stone lasting at least forty thousand years, and an Age of Man lasting a million years. So young is the subject of our history”

"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 superceded ways."

"hope soon wins the victory over [defeatist, pessimistic] thought ... giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently indispensable to life and work"

"Religion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or of chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness, and loneliness of men"

"Humanity, patient under every cataclysm, renews it's hope, takes courage, and builds once more"

"Everywhere in Cretan life man expresses his vainest and noblest passion -- the zeal to beautify."

"It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it is to maintain it without slaves."

"Man's greatest enemy, death, is overxome by woman's mysterious power, reproduction."

"Success and a surfeit of commissions spoil [the middle Minoan Cretan painter]; he ... falls into the lassitude of an art that knows that it has passed its zenith and must die."

"A nation is born stoic and dies epicurean"

"Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and bery being have been lost in the careless flow of time."

"Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae learned that piracy -- like its civilized offspring, tariff dues -- can strangle commerce and internationalize poverty"

"Civlizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation."