I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say “Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history.
In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce – except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.
It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.
When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.
Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.
The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;.
If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it – perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.
Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation.
Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.
Peace is war by other means.
Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,′ people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and ‘he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.’ Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.
All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.
Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.
Facts” replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.
There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole.