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Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civ...more

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No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

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[W]orship, if not the child, is at leastthe brother, of fear.

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So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

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History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

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It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the pa...more

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Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

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One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

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A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. ...more

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[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.

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Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of th...more

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There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

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[R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man.

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A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding t...more

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For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?