★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
It took me more than twenty years to read this first volume of the epic Story of Civilization by Will Durant. Now, I hope the read the remaining ten volumes over the course of the next year. My history education is underway!
Highlights
It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace, and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths. (Page 222)
Barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.
A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.