So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Drunkenness was in good repute in England till “Bloody Mary” frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.
The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.
Nothing is new except arrangement.
Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.
The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can’t be done.
Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.
When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.
Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
Caesar’s armies marched on vegetarian foods.
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.