I just finished The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1 (1976) by Will Durant. It’s a fantastic read; Durant is eloquent, witty, and surprisingly relevant today. Below are some of my personal highlights of his writing, mixed with some quotes-of-quotes I found interesting.

Sections: Introduction | Communism | Government | Women | Morals | Language | Appearance | Sumeria Egypt | Babylon | Assyria | Judea | Persia | India | China | Japan | Conclusions

Introduction

“the provincialism of our traditional histories, which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line, has become no merely academic error, but a possibly fatal failure of perspective and intelligence”

“Civilization is an interlude between ice ages”

“…the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able”

“The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears.”

“Of what are you thinking?” Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. “I do not have to think,” was the answer; “I have plenty of meat.” Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom"

“If man began with speech, and civilization with agriculture, industry began with fire”

“This primitive skill displayed itself proudly in the art of weaving. Here, too, the animal showed man the way. The web of the spider, the nest of the bird, the crossing and texture of fibres and leaves in the natural embroidery of the woods, set an example so obvious that in all probability weaving was one of the earliest arts of the human race”

“Cattle were a convenient standard of value and medium of exchange among hunters and herders; they bore interest through breeding, and they were easy to carry, since they transported themselves”

Communism

“When Turner told a Samoan about the poor in London the “savage” asked in astonishment: “How is it? No food? No friends? No house to live in? Where did he grow? Are there no houses belonging to his friends?” The hungry Indian had but to ask to receive; no matter how small the supply was, food was given him if he needed it; “no one can want food while there is corn anywhere in the town.””

“White travelers in Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a present of food or other valuables to a “black man” was at once distributed; so that when a suit of clothes was given to one of them the donor soon found the recipient wearing the hat, a friend the trousers, another friend the coat”

“What is extremely surprising,” reports a missionary “is to see them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does not find among common people in the most civilized nations”

“Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as “so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them”

“Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized; or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality”

“Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty”

“It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellow men, and merely made them slaves”

Government

“The Dyaks had no other government than that of each family by its head; in case of strife they chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him strictly; but once the conflict was ended they literally sent him about his business”

“Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property”

“Though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect”

“The old Russian Government established courts of law in the Aleutian Islands, but in fifty years those courts found no employment. “Crime and offenses,” reports Brinton, “were so infrequent under the social system of the Iroquois that they can scarcely be said to have had a penal code.” Such are the ideal—perhaps the idealized—conditions for whose return the anarchist perennially pines.”

“It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.”

“To violate law is to win the admiration of half the populace, who secretly envy anyone who can outwit this ancient enemy; to violate custom is to incur almost universal hostility”

“The first stage in the evolution of law is personal revenge… The second step toward law and civilization in the treatment of crime was the substitution of damages for revenge… It is but a step from settling disputes and punishing offenses to making some effort to prevent them.”

“Primitive punishments are cruel, because primitive society feels insecure; as social organization becomes more stable, punishments become less severe”

Women

“woman, apart from her biological disabilities, was almost the equal of man in stature, endurance, resourcefulness and courage; she was not yet an ornament, a thing of beauty or a sexual toy; she was a robust animal, able to perform arduous work for long hours, and, if necessary to fight to the death for her children or her clan.”

“It was she who developed the home, slowly adding man to the list of her domesticated animals, and training him in those social dispositions and amenities which are the psychological basis and cement of civilization”

“Since no society can exist without order and no order without regulation, we may take it as a rule of history that the power of custom varies inversely as the multiplicity of laws, much as the power of instinct varies inversely as the multiplicity of thoughts”

“The first task of those customs that constitute the moral code of a group is to regulate the relations of the sexes, for these are a perennial source of discord, violence, and possible degeneration.”

“There is no record of women objecting to marriage by purchase; on the contrary, they took keen pride in the sums paid for them, and scorned the woman who gave herself in marriage without a price; they believed that in a “love-match” the villainous male was getting too much for nothing”

“A Maori mother wailing loudly bitterly cursed the youth who had eloped with her daughter until he presented her with a blanket. “That was all I wanted,” she said; “I only wanted to get a blanket, and therefore made this noise”

“Marriage was a profitable partnership, not a private debauch; it was a way whereby a man and a woman, working together might be more prosperous than if each worked alone”

“as Anacharsis put it among the Greeks, if one were to bring together all customs considered sacred by some group, and were then to take away all customs considered immoral by some group, nothing would remain”

“The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years”

“Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today”

“The Yakuts have been known to eat forty pounds of meat in one day; and similar stories, only less heroic, are told of the Eskimos and the natives of Australia”

“for to many a primitive mind no argument is settled until one of the disputants is dead”

“In several tribes no woman would marry a man who had not killed some one, in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of headhunting, which survives in the Philippines today”

Morals

“primitive hospitality, in many tribes, went to the extent of offering to the traveler the wife or daughter of the host. To decline such an offer was a serious offense, not only to the host but to the woman; these are among the perils faced by missionaries”

“Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to themselves”

“Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied”

“men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science”

“The dwarfs of the Cameroon recognized only malevolent deities, and did nothing to placate them, on the ground that it was useless to try”

“In the Molucca Islands blossoming trees were treated as pregnant; no noise, fire, or other disturbance was permitted to mar their peace; else, like a frightened woman, they might drop their fruit before time.”

“It is the tendency of gods to begin as ogres and to end as loving fathers; the idol passes into an ideal as the growing security peacefulness and moral sense of the worshipers pacify and transform the features of their once ferocious deities. The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.”

“—a desired action was suggested to the deities by a partial or imitative performance of the action by men. To make rain fall some primitive magicians poured water out upon the ground, preferably from a tree. The Kaffirs, threatened by drought, asked a missionary to go into the fields with an opened umbrella… In the Babar Archipelago the would-be mother fashioned a doll out of red cotton, pretended to suckle it, and repeated a magic formula; then she sent word through the village that she was pregnant, and her friends came to congratulate her; only a very obstinate reality could refuse to emulate this imagination.”

“The favorite object of primitive tabu was woman.”

“In the end terrestrial forces prevail; morals slowly adjust themselves to economic invention, and religion reluctantly adjusts itself to moral change. The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than to create new ones”

Language

“Gesture seems primary, speech secondary, in the earlier transmission of thought; and when speech fails, gesture comes again to the fore.”

“Gesture was so prominent in some Indian languages that the Arapahos, like some modern peoples, could hardly converse in the dark”

“Nothing surprises the natural man so much as the ability of Europeans to communicate with one another over great distances, by making black scratches upon a piece of paper”

“Perhaps science, like civilization in general, began with agriculture; geometry, as its name indicates, was the measurement of the soil”

“Damara natives would not exchange two sheep for four sticks, but willingly exchanged, twice in succession, one sheep for two sticks”

“Perhaps we should employ another gender here, for probably the first doctors were women; not only because they were the natural nurses of the men, nor merely because they made midwifery rather than venality the oldest profession, but because their closer connection with the soil gave them a superior knowledge of plants, and enabled them to develop the art of medicine as distinct from the magic-mongering of the priests.”

“It is astonishing how many cures primitive doctors effected despite their theories of disease”

Appearance

“Primitive man seldom thinks of selecting women because of what we should call their beauty; he thinks rather of their usefulness, and never dreams of rejecting a strong-armed bride because of her ugliness”

“There is,” says Georg, “no part of the body that has not been perfected, decorated, disfigured, painted, bleached, tattooed, reformed, stretched or squeezed, out of vanity or desire for ornament.””

“Clothing was apparently in its origins, a form of ornament, a sexual deterrent or charm rather than an article of use against cold or shame”

“Cook had said of them, timelessly, they were “content to be naked, but ambitious to be fine.””

“The Queen of the Wabunias on the Congo wore a brass collar weighing twenty pounds; she had to lie down every now and then to rest. Poor women who were so unfortunate as to have only light jewelry imitated carefully the steps of those who carried great burdens of bedizenment.”

“The taut string of the bow became the origin of a hundred instruments from the primitive lyre to the Stradivarius violin and the modern pianoforte”

“Bone tools—pins, anvils, polishers, etc.—were now added to those of stone; and art appeared in the form of crude engravings on the rocks, or simple figurines in high relief, mostly of nude women.”

“In the ruins of a neolithic mine at Brandon, England, eight worn picks of deer horn were found, on whose dusty surfaces were the finger-prints of the workmen who had laid down those tools ten thousand years ago.”

Sumeria

“History so soon began its tragic alternance of art and war.”

“The form of these poems is unexpectedly first-personal, and the style does not please the sophisticated ear; but across the four thousand years that separate us from the Sumerian singer we feel the desolation of his city and his people”

“The wars were waged frankly for commercial routes and goods, without catchwords as a sop for idealists”

“King Manish-tusu of Akkad announced frankly that he was invading Elam to get control of its silver mines, and to secure diorite stone to immortalize himself with statuary—the only instance known of a war fought for the sake of art”

“The best element in this code was a plan for avoiding litigation: every case was first submitted to a public arbitrator whose duty it was to bring about an amicable settlement without recourse to law. It is a poor civilization from which we may not learn something to improve our own”

“As early as 2000 B.C. Sumerian historians began to reconstruct the past and record the present for the edification of the future; portions of their work have come down to us not in the original form but as quotations in later Babylonian chronicles.”

Egypt

“Nearby, the Sphinx, half lion and half philosopher, grimly claws the sand, and glares unmoved at the transient visitor and the eternal plain”

“to bring these vast stones six hundred miles, to raise some of them, weighing many tons, to a height of half a thousand feet, and to pay or even to feed, the hundred thousand slaves who toiled for twenty years on these Pyramids…”

“With his knowledge of Greek, and the eleven letters made out from the obelisk, Champollion, after more than twenty years of labor deciphered the whole inscription, discovered the entire Egyptian alphabet, and opened the way to the recovery of a lost world. It was one of the peaks in the history of history”

““All the world fears Time,” says an Arab proverb, “but Time fears the Pyramids.””

“this alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history, as if men tired alternately of immoderate liberty and excessive order”

“But Hatshepsut set this high-destined youngster aside, assumed full royal powers, and proved herself a king in everything but gender.”

“they made everything from boats and carriages, chairs and beds, to handsome coffins that almost invited men to die.”

“If,” says Peschel, “we compare the technical inventory of the Egyptians with our own, it is evident that before the invention of the steam-engine we scarcely excelled them in anything.””

“A chalk tablet in the British Museum contains a chief workman’s record of forty-three workers, listing their absences and their causes—“ill,” or “sacrificing to the god,” or just plain “lazy.””

“[The] quantity of radishes, garlic and onions consumed by the workmen who built it; these things, too, had to have their immortality”

“A Greek tradition reports a great revolt in Egypt, in which the slaves captured a province, and held it so long that time, which sanctions everything, gave them legal ownership of it.”

“Machinery was rare because muscle was cheap”

“One tomb inscription describes its occupant as “Overseer of the Cosmetic Box, Overseer of the Cosmetic Pencil, Sandal Bearer to the King, doing in the matter of the King’s sandals to the satisfaction of his Law”

““No people, ancient or modern,“said Max Müller, “has given women so high a legal status as did the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.”

“Hatshepsut and Cleopatra rose to be queens, and ruled and ruined like kings.”

“shame is a child of custom rather than of nature,”

“Copy-books survive from the days of the Empire with the corrections of the masters still adorning the margins; the abundance of errors would console the modern schoolboy.”

“Khekheperre-Sonbu, a savant of the reign of Senusret II, about 2150B.C., complained that all things had long since been said, and nothing remained for literature except repetition.”

“The sign for 1,000,000 was a picture of a man striking his hands above his head, as if to express amazement that such a number should exist”

“Egyptian geometry measured not only the area of squares, circles and cubes, but also the cubic content of cylinders and spheres; and it arrived at 3.16 as the value of π. We enjoy the honor of having advanced from 3.16 to 3.1416 in four thousand years.”

“The wisdom of the Egyptians was a proverb with the Greeks, who felt themselves children beside this ancient race.”

“In part such literature represents one of those interludes, like our own moral interregnum, in which thought has for a time overcome belief, and men no longer know how or why they should live. Such periods do not endure; hope soon wins the victory over thought; the intellect is put down to its customary menial place, and religion is born again, giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently indispensable to life and work”

“It is one of the tragedies of history that Ikhnaton, having achieved his elevating vision of universal unity, was not satisfied to let the noble quality of his new religion slowly win the hearts of men. He was unable to think of his truth in relative terms; the thought came to him that other forms of belief and worship were indecent and intolerable. Suddenly he gave orders that the names of all gods but Aton should be erased and chiseled from every public inscription in Egypt; he mutilated his father’s name from a hundred monuments to cut from it the word Amon; he declared all creeds but his own illegal, and commanded that all the old temples should be closed.”

“More and more the people starved in order that the gods might eat.”

Babylon

“Despite the secular quality of his laws Hammurabi was clever enough to gild his authority with the approval of the gods.”

“Nearly all the bricks so far recovered from the site of Babylon bear the proud inscription: “I am Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon.””

“What modern city is so well governed that it would dare to offer such reimbursements to the victims of its negligence? Has the law progressed since Hammurabi, or only increased and multiplied?”

“We should remember, however, that the defeat of Chaos is only a myth”

“Even Alexander, who was not above dying of drinking, was shocked by the morals of Babylon”

“we cannot judge a civilization from such fragments as the ocean of time has thrown up from the wreckage of Babylon”

“These Babylonian libraries are lost; but one of the greatest of them, that of Borsippa, was copied and preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, whose 30,000 tablets are the main source of our knowledge of Babylonian life…the avowed purpose of Ashurbanipal’s library was to preserve the literature of Babylonia from oblivion”

“But this almost secularized science found itself helpless before the demand of the people for supernatural diagnosis and magical cures. Sorcerers and necromancers were more popular than physicians, and enforced, by their influence with the populace, irrational methods of treatment”

“For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility.”

“he hunted nations as well as animals:”

“His son Sennacherib put down revolts in the distant provinces adjoining the Persian Gulf, attacked Jerusalem and Egypt without success, sacked eighty-nine cities and 820 villages, captured 7,200 horses, 11,000 asses, 80,000 oxen, 800,000 sheep, and 208,000 prisoners; the official historian, on his life, did not understate these figures.”

Assyria

“Probably it was in part by their reputation for mercy to prisoners of war that Alexander and Caesar undermined the morale of the enemy, and conquered the Mediterranean world.”

“All in all, the Assyrian government was primarily an instrument of war. For war was often more profitable than peace; it cemented discipline, intensified patriotism, strengthened the royal power, and brought abundant spoils and slaves for the enrichment and service of the capital.”

“As we read such pages we become reconciled to our own mediocrity.”

“but they had brought into Assyria, as captives, millions of destitute aliens who bred with the fertility of the hopeless, destroyed all national unity of character and blood, and became by their growing numbers a hostile and disintegrating force in the very midst of the conquerors”

“Like all early voyagers, and some old languages, they made scant distinction between trade and treachery, commerce and robbery; they stole from the weak, cheated the stupid, and were honest with the rest”

Judea

“Next to the promulgation of the “Book of Law,” the building of the Temple was the most important event in the epic of the Jews. It not only gave Yahveh a home, but it gave Judea a spiritual center and capital, a vehicle of tradition, a memory to serve as a pillar of fire through centuries of wandering over the earth.”

“He is talkative, and likes to make long speeches; but he is shy, and will not allow men to see anything of him but his hind parts. Never was there so thoroughly human a god.”

“He will have no pacifist nonsense; he knows that even a Promised Land can be won, and held, only by the sword;”

“it will take centuries of military defeat, political subjugation, and moral development, to transform him into the gentle and loving Father of Hillel and Christ”

“Since poverty is created by wealth, and never knows itself poor until riches stare it in the face, so it required the fabulous fortune of Solomon to mark the beginning of the class war in Israel”

“It is true that Amos dulls the edge of his idealism by putting into the mouth of his god a Mississippi of threats whose severity and accumulation make the reader sympathize for a moment with the drinkers of wine and the listeners to music.”

“Destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, Jerusalem rises again, symbol of the vitality and pertinacity of an heroic race. The Jews, who are as old as history, may be as lasting as civilization”

“the scenes of our youth, like the past, are always beautiful if we do not have to live in them again”

Persia

“So far as we can visualize him through the haze of legend, he was the most amiable of conquerors, and founded his empire upon generosity. His enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is to kill or die”

“The first principle of his policy was that the various peoples of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship—that religion is stronger than the state.”

“He publicly scoffed at the Egyptian religion, and plunged his dagger derisively into the bull revered by the Egyptians as the god Apis; he exhumed mummies and pried into royal tombs regardless of ancient curses; he profaned the temples and ordered their idols to be burned. He thought in this way to cure the Egyptians of superstition; but when he was stricken with illness—apparently epileptic convulsions—the Egyptians were certain that their gods had punished him, and that their theology was now confirmed beyond dispute.”

“He had hoped to govern in peace, but it is the fatality of empire to breed repeated war”

“Persian councils never undertook serious discussions of policy when sober—though they took care to revise their decisions the next morning”

“For it was a proud boast of Persia that its laws never changed, and that a royal promise or decree was irrevocable.”

“The generosity and kindliness enjoined by the Master did not apply, in practice,to infidels—i.e., foreigners; these were inferior species of men, whom Ahura-Mazda had deluded into loving their own countries only in order that they should not invade Persia.”

“The Persians, says Herodotus, “esteem themselves to be far the most excellent of men in every respect… [they] believe that other nations approach to excellence according to their geographical proximity to Persia, but that they are the worst who live farthest from them””

“All in all [Zoroastrianism] was a splendid religion, less warlike and bloody, less idolatrous and superstitious, than the other religions of its time; and it did not deserve to die so soon”

“But humanity loves poetry more than logic, and without a myth the people perish.”

“It is a testimony to the character of the Persians that whereas any one could hire Greeks to fight Greeks, it was rare indeed that a Persian could be hired to fight Persians.”

“They resorted more frequently to spells than to drugs, on the ground that the spells, though they might not cure the illness, would not kill the patient—which was more than could be said for the drugs”

“When the two armies met at Issus Alexander had no more than 30,000 followers; but Darius, with all the stupidity that destiny could require, had chosen a field in which only a small part of his multitude couldfight at one time. When the slaughter was over the Macedonians had lost some 450, the Persians 110,000 men, most of these being slain in wild retreat;”

India

“Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India.”

“our knowledge of the past is an occasional gap in our ignorance”

“They were too primitive to be hypocrites: they subjugated India without pretending to elevate it”

“They wanted land, and pasture for their cattle; their word for war said nothing about national honor, but simply meant “a desire for more cows”

“Marriage might be entered into by forcible abduction of the bride, by purchase of her or by mutual consent. Marriage by consent, however was considered slightly disreputable; women thought it more honorable to be bought and paid for, and a great compliment to be stolen”

““In the whole world,” said Schopenhauer “there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death.””

“The Jains, having emptied the sky of God, soon peopled it again with the deified saints of Jain history and legend.”

“Buddha was convinced that pain so overbalanced pleasure in human life that it would be better never to have been born”

“One of his disciples concluded that Buddha would approve of suicide, but Buddha reproved him; suicide would be useless, since the soul, unpurified, would be reborn in other incarnations.”

“There is nothing stranger in the history of religion than the sight of Buddha founding a worldwide religion, and yet refusing to be drawn into any discussion about eternity, immortality, or God.”

“The simplicity of their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they seldom go to law.”

“The government made no pretense to democracy and was probably the most efficient that India has ever had”

“In the political sense Ashoka had failed; in another sense he had accomplished one of the greatest tasks in history. Within two hundred years after his death Buddhism had spread throughout India, and was entering upon the bloodless conquest of Asia. If to this day, from Kandy in Ceylonto Kamakura in Japan, the placid face of Gautama bids men be gentle to one another and love peace, it is partly because a dreamer, perhaps a saint, once held the throne of India.”

“The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

“The Hindus had allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war; they had adopted religions like Buddhism and Jainism, which unnerved them for the tasks of life; they had failed to organize their forces for the protection of their frontiers and their capitals, their wealth and their freedom, from the hordes of Scythians, Huns, Afghans and Turks hovering about India’s boundaries and waiting for national weakness to let them in. For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came”

“he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naphtha and burnt to the ground”

“He was generous, expending vast sums in alms; he was affable to all, but especially to the lowly; “their little offerings,” says a Jesuit missionary “he used to accept with such a pleased look, handling them and putting them in his bosom, as he did not do with the most lavish gifts of the nobles.””

“Deeper than these interests was his penchant for speculation. This well-nigh omnipotent emperor secretly yearned to be a philosopher-much as philosophers long to be emperors, and cannot comprehend the stupidity of Providence in withholding from them their rightful thrones.”

“Jehangir was not so much a mediocrity as an able degenerate.”

“The Emperor himself,in his last years, began to realize that by the very narrowness of his piety he had destroyed the heritage of his fathers. His deathbed letters are pitiful documents.”

“In the seventh century the Arabs captured Persia and Egypt, and thereafter trade between Europe and Asia passed through Moslem hands; hence the Crusades, and Columbus.”

“Death was the penalty for any of a great variety of crimes, such as housebreaking, damage to royal property or theft on a scale that would now make a man a very pillar of society”

““Better thine own work is, though done with fault,” said the Bhagavad-Gita, “than doing others’ work, even excellently.””

“Passages of the Code advocate an enlightened gentleness to women: they are not to be struck “even with a flower”; they are not to be watched too strictly, for then their subtlety will find a way to mischief; and if they like fine raiment-it is wise to indulge them, for “if the wife be not elegantly attired, she will not exhilarate her husband,” where as when “a wife is gaily adorned, the whole house is embellished.””

“In so warm a climate clothing was a superfluity, and beggars and saints bridged the social scale in agreeing to do without it. One southern caste, like the Canadian Doukhobors, threatened to migrate if its members were compelled to wear clothing.”

““I have had before me,” says a British judge in India,“hundreds of cases in which a man’s property liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it”

“The growth of Buddhism and monasticism in the first year of our era sapped the manhood of India, and conspired with political division to leave India open to easy conquest.”

“Buddhism, like Christianity, won its greatest triumphs outside the land of its birth; and it won them without shedding a drop of blood”

“the cynical view of the matter is that the Brahmans believed that cows should never be slaughtered, that insects should never be injured, and that widows should be burned alive”

“The secret of polytheism is the inability of the simple mind to think in impersonal terms; it can understand persons more readily than forces, wills more easily than laws”

“Since the real problem of life is not suffering but undeserved suffering, the religion of India mitigates the human tragedy by giving meaning and value to grief and pain”

“Doubtless when India was wealthy, sceptics were numerous, for humanity doubts its gods most when it prospers, and worships them most when it is miserable.”

“They relied upon the conservatism of the poor to preserve the orthodox religion, and they were not disappointed.”

“It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions”

“In the time of Yuan Chwang Hindu medical treatment began with a seven-day fast; in this interval the patient often recovered;”

“The Vedas” he says, simply, “are an authority, since the author of them knew the established truth.” After which he proceeds without paying any attention to the Vedas.”

“Such enlightenment cannot be won at a stroke; the aspirant must move towards it step by step, and no stage of the process can be understood by anyone who has not passed through the stages before it;”

“our Way of perceiving will forever be inextricably mingled with the thing perceived.”

“As our energies tire in the daily struggle against impartial Nature and hostile Time, we look with more tolerance upon Oriental philosophies of surrender and peace.”

“Though she passes through the Ordeal of Fire to prove her innocence, he sends her away to a forest hermitage with that bitter trick of heredity whereby one generation repeats upon the next the sins and errors which it suffered from its elders in its youth.”

“a people that has lost the ability to govern itself, or to develop its natural resources, inevitably falls prey to nations suffering from strength and greed”

“sometimes, on a sofa in an inner room, he would spend half a day silent with his memories and his dreams”

“Shorn of religious belief, which is the very spirit of India, the Westernized Hindus returned to their country disillusioned and sad; a thousand gods had dropped dead from the skies”

“While still a boy Mohandas became an atheist, being displeased with the adulterous gallantries of certain Hindu gods; and to make clear his everlasting scorn for religion, he ate meat. The meat disagreed with him, and he returned to religion”

“The Judge expressed his profound regret that he had to send to jail one whom millions of his countrymen considered “a great patriot and a great leader”; he admitted that even those who differed from Gandhi looked upon him “as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.” He sentenced him to prison for six years.”

“It was Gandhi’s task to unify India; and he accomplished it. Other tasks await other men.”

China

“China has been called “the paradise of historians.” For centuries and millenniums it has had official historiographers who recorded everything that happened, and much besides”

“legend, which loves personalities more than ideas, attributes to a few individuals the laborious advances of many generations.”

“and endeared himself to scholastic posterity by reducing the size of the whip with which Chinese children were educated”

“In his reign, according to sacred legend, rice wine was discovered, and was presented to the Emperor; but Yü dashed it to the ground, predicting: “The day will come when this thing will cost some one a kingdom.” He banished the discoverer and prohibited the new beverage; whereupon the Chinese, for the instruction of posterity, made wine the national beverage”

“For the rest we must rely on stories whose truth may not be proportioned to their charm.”

“The historians, more virtuous than history, assure us that Wu Yi was struck dead with lightning”

“Annoyed by pamphlets in which Teng criticized his policies, the prime minister prohibited the posting of pamphlets inpublic places. Teng thereupon delivered his pamphlets in person. The minister forbade the delivery of pamphlets. Teng smuggled them to his readers by concealing them in other articles. The government ended the argument by cutting off his head”

“The intellectual man is a danger to the state because he thinks in terms of regulations and laws; he wishes to construct a society like geometry, and does not realize that such regulation destroys the living freedom and vigor of the parts. The simpler man, who knows from his own experience the pleasure and efficacy of work conceived and carried out in liberty is less of a peril when he is in power for he does not have to be told that a law is a dangerous thing, and may injure more than it may help. Such a ruler regulates men as little as possible; if he guides the nation it is away from all artifice and complexity towards a normal and artless simplicity, in which life would follow the wisely thoughtless routine of nature,”

“In the ancient days, says Lao, nature made men and life simple and peaceful, and all the world was happy. But then men attained knowledge, they complicated life with inventions, they lost all mental and moral innocence, they moved from the fields to the cities, and began to write books; hence all the misery of men, and the tears of the philosophers”

“Passivity has its victories more often than action”

“if the wise man knows more than other men he tries to conceal it; “he will temper his brightness, and bring himself into agreement with the obscurity (of others); he agrees with the simple rather than with the learned, and does not suffer from the novice’s instinct of contradiction”

“and indeed, from some points of view it is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages”

“Confucius taught the art of reasoning not through rules or syllogisms, but by the perpetual play of his keen mind upon the opinions of his pupils; when they went out from his school they knew nothing about logic, but they could think clearly and to the point”

“Obscurity of thought and insincere inaccuracy of speech seemed to him national calamities.”

“men will not take seriously one who is not serious with them;”

“There was not much of the revolutionist in Confucius; perhaps he suspected that the inheritors of a revolution are made of the same flesh as the men whom it deposed”

“Therefore the prime instrument of government is good example: the ruler must be an eminence of model behavior, from which, by prestige imitation, right conduct will pour down upon his people”

“In the long run the philosophy of Confucius triumphed. We shall see later how the mighty Shih Huang-ti, with a Legalist for his prime minister, sought to end the influence of Confucius by ordering that all existing Confucian literature should be burned. But the power of the word proved stronger than that of the sword; the books which the “First Emperor” sought to destroy became holy and precious through his enmity, and men died as martyrs in the effort to preserve them.”

“He was among the earliest of Chinese logicians, and the worst of Chinese reasoners”

“It is true that the wicked sometimes leave a bad name behind them, but this is a matter that does not disturb their bones”

“Again we suspect that time, who is a reactionary, has preserved for us the most respectable of Chinese thinkers, and has swallowed nearly all the rest in the limbo of forgotten souls”

“We perceive how old are the political problems, attitudes and solutions of our enlightened age when we learn that Mencius was rejected by the princes for his radicalism, and was scorned for his conservatism by the socialists”

“The “return to Nature,” however, could not be so readily discouraged; it found voice in this age as in every other”

“If by some negligence on his part, a true philosopher should find himself in charge of a state, his proper course would be to do nothing, and allow men in freedom to build their own organs of self-government.”

“Yao and Shun, instead of being so honored by China and Confucius, should be charged with having destroyed the primitive happiness of mankind by introducing government”

“Huns, barred for a time from Chinese soil, moved west into Europe and down into Italy; Rome fell because China built a wall”

“He decreed that his dynastic successors should number themselves from him as “First Emperor,” down to the ten thousandth of their line; but the line ended with his son.”

“Disorder followed his death, as it has followed the passing of almost every dictator in history; only an immortal can wisely take all power into his hands”

“On his accession to power he surrounded himself not with the usual politicians, but with men trained in letters and philosophy; to these men his enemies attributed his failure, and his friends attributed his success.”

“Wang had conceived his policies in economic terms, and had forgotten the nature of man. He worked long hours, day and night, to devise schemes that would make the nation rich and happy; and he was heart broken to find that social disorder mounted during his reign.”

“What we do see is, above all, brevity. We are apt to think these poems too slight, and feel an unreal disappointment at missing the majesty and boredom of Milton and Homer. But the Chinese believe that all poetry must be brief; that a long poem is a contradiction in terms—since poetry, to them, is a moment’s ecstasy, and dies when dragged out in epic reams”

““The men of old,” say the Chinese, “reckoned it the highest excellence in poetry that the meaning should be beyond the words, and that the reader should have to think it out for himself.””

“Like Chinese manners and art, Chinese poetry is a matter of infinite grace concealed in a placid simplicity.”

“The Chinese pardonably consider their literature superior to any other than that of Greece; and perhaps the exception is due to Oriental courtesy”

“and this office of court historian, carried down to our own generation, has raised up in China a mass of historical literature unequaled in length or dullness anywhere else on the earth”

“In a conflict between superstition and philosophy one may safely wager on the victory of superstition, for the world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom”

“As the result of Ch’ien Lung’s prohibition of woman players, female parts were acted by men, and so well that when women were in our time again admitted to the stage, they had to imitate their imitators in order to succeed.”

“and brought to many hearers that escape from the strife of wills and ideas which comes with the surrender to music well composed”

“The pursuit of wisdom and the passion for beauty are the two poles of the Chinese mind, and China might loosely be defined as philosophy and porcelain”

“Finally their greatest achievements were unconsciously hidden from Western travelers. For the Chinese do not flaunt their pictures on public or private walls; they roll them up and store them carefully away and unfold them for occasional enjoyment as we take down and read a book”

“Hui Tsung, with an empire at his command, gave half his life to painting birds and flowers.”

“the world of beauty and the world of money never touch, even when beautiful things are sold.”

“The educated classes displayed long nails as Western women wore French heels—to indicate their exemption from physical toil”

“In the third century Hua To wrote a volume on surgery and made operations popular by inventing a wine which produced a general anesthesia; it is one of the stupidities of history that the formula for mixing this drink has been lost”

“Soap was a rare luxury, but lice and vermin were easily secured”

“For through this profound institution the nation, which was shut out from physical and spatial unity by great distances and the poverty of transport, achieved a powerful spiritual unity in time; the generations were bound together with the tough web of tradition, and the individual life received an ennobling share and significance in a drama of timeless majesty and scope.”

“But in the second century of our era these doctrines were improved upon by men who claimed to have received, in direct line from Lao-tze, an elixir that would confer immortality. This drink became so popular that several emperors are said to have died from pious indulgence in it”

“What the Chinese,” said Voltaire, “best know, cultivate the most, and have brought to the greatest perfection, is morality.”

“By building the house on a sound foundation,” Confucius had said, “the world is made secure”

“Though economically subordinate the woman enjoyed the franchise of the tongue, and might scold her man into fright or flight in the best Occidental style”

“The most impressive aspect of this civilization was its system of government. If the ideal state is a combination of democracy and aristocracy, the Chinese have had it for more than a thousand years; if the best government is that which governs least, then the Chinese have had the best. Never has a government governed so many people, or governed them so little, or so long.”

“There was not a word in any of the tests about science, business or industry; the object was to reveal not knowledge but judgment and character. Those who survived the tests were at last eligible for the higher offices in the state”

“Considerable portions of this indemnity were later remitted to China by the United States, Great Britain, Russia and Japan, usually with the stipulation that the remitted sums bespent in educating students from China in the universities of the remitting nation. It was a gesture of generosity, which proved more effective in the undoing of old China than almost any other single factor in this historic and tragic conflict of East and West.”

“The European world, which had proposed a moratorium on robbery after it had gathered in all available spoils joined America feebly in protests against this candid plunder, but prepared, as always, to accept victory as justification in the end.”

“Once everything changed except the East; now there is nothing in the East that does not change. The most conservative nation in history has suddenly become, after Russia, the most radical, and is destroying with a will customs and institutions once held inviolate. It is not merely the end of a dynasty, as in 1644; it is the moulting of a civilization”

“The queue is gone, and so are the graceful manners of the older time; the hatreds of revolution have coarsened the spirit, and radicals find it hard to be courteous to conservatives”

“Revolution, like death and style, is the removal of rubbish, the surgery of the superfluous; it comes only when there are many things ready to die. China has died many times before; and many times she has been reborn.”

Japan

“The feudal system triumphed in Japan for the same reason that it had triumphed in Europe: local sources of authority grew in power as a central and distant government failed to maintain security and order”

“Kublai ordered from his ship-builders so vast a fleet that Chinese poets represented the hills as mourning for their denuded forests”

“The Japanese, in heroic retrospect, reckoned the vessels at 70,000, but less patriotic historians are content with 3,500 ships and 100,000 men”

“The legal system of Japan was a vigorous supplement to private assassination and revenge”

“In the Nara period the state nationalized the land, and rented it to the peasant for six years or at most, till death; but the government discovered that men did not care to improve or properly care for land that might in a short time be assigned to others; and the experiment ended in a restoration of private ownership, with state provision of funds in the spring to finance the planting and reaping of the crops”

“When he heard that Hideyoshi was coming to see his famous collection of chrysanthemums, Rikyu destroyed all the blossoms in his garden but one, so that this might shine unrivaled before the terrible shogun”

“Flowers are the religion of the Japanese; they worship them with sacrificial fervor and national accord. They watch for the blossoms appropriate to each season; and when, for a week or two in early April, the cherry-tree blooms, all Japan seems to leave its work to gaze at it, or even to make pilgrimages to places where the miracle is most abundant and complete”

“Criminals en route to execution will sometimes ask for a flower”

“The more serious devotee might cleanse his spirit by praying for a quarter of an hour under a waterfall in the depth of winter; or he might go on pilgrimages from shrine to shrine of his sect, meanwhile feasting his soul on the beauty of his native land”

“The aim of learning is not merely to widen knowledge but to form character. Its object is to make us true men, rather than learned men.”

“The chief reason why the teachings of the sages are not more appreciated by the people is because scholars endeavor to show off their learning, rather than to make it their endeavor to live up to the teachings of the sages.”

“The Shogunate trembled at the notion that every man might judge for himself what was right and what was wrong.”

“When he died they placed this enviable epitaph upon his tomb: He did not talk about the faults of others…He cared for nothing but books. His life was uneventful”

“Unlike Togai he enjoyed controversy and spoke his mind violently about philosophers living or dead. When an inquiring young man asked him, “What do you like besides reading?” he answered, “There is nothing better than eating burnt beans and criticizing the great men of Japan.””

“The Jesuits, harassed with these linguistic barriers, reported that the language of the islands had been invented by the Devil to prevent the preaching of the Gospel to the Japanese.”

“The Japanese, with whom gambling is a favorite passion, wagered so much money in haiku-composing contests that some enterprising souls made a business of conducting them, fleecing thousands of devotees daily, until at last the government was forced to raid these poetical resorts and prohibit this new mercenary art”

“Murasaki writes with a naturalness and ease that soon turn her pages into the charming gossip of a cultured friend.”

“He accepted poverty with good humor and, having no furniture, hung his bare walls with paintings of the furniture he might have had.”

“On his deathbed Ikku enjoined his pupils to place upon his corpse, before the cremation then usual in Japan, certain packets which he solemnly entrusted to them. At his funeral, prayers having been said, the pyre was lighted, whereupon it turned out that the packets were full of firecrackers, which exploded merrily. Ikku had kept his youthful promise that his life would be full of surprises, even after his death”

“The death of a civilization seldom comes from without; internal decay must weaken the fibre of a society before external influences or attacks can change its essential structure, or bring it to an end.”

“The eternal war of the generations—the revolt of over-eager youth against overcautious age—has been intensified by the growth of individualist industry, and the weakening of religious faith”

“A Chinese boycott of Japanese goods ensued; but Japan proceeded on the historically correct assumption that boycotts are sooner or later frustrated by the tendency of trade to follow the line of lowest costs”

Conclusion

“The institutions, customs, arts and morals of a people represent the natural selection of its countless trial-and-error experiments,the accumulated and unformulable wisdom of all its generations;”

“Europe and America are the spoiled child and grandchild of Asia”

“It would conceive man as a citizen rather than as a subject; it would give him political liberty civil rights, and an unparalleled measure of mental and moral freedom; it would create democracy and invent the individual.”