143914995X
Will and Ariel Durant
Notes
…we cooperate in our group – our family, community, club, church, party, race, or nation – in order to strengthen our group in a competition with other groups.
The labors of educators are apparently canceled in each generation by the fertility of the uninformed.
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they opposed…Probably every vice was once a virtue -i.e., a quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall…they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under.
Generally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order; skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, family, and morality without basically endangering the stability of the state…There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
“…the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceful partial redistribution.
…internal liberty varies inversely as external danger.
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.
Monarchy seems to be the most natural kind of government.