★★★★☆ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads Highlights
Volume VI of the amazing Story of Civilization series. So much of this period of history was new to me. I am getting such an education in history and philosophy.
Highlights
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
It is a lesson of history that men lie most when they govern states.
The basic fact in the history of the Scottish state is fear of England. English kings, for England’s safety from rear attack, time and again tried to annex Scotland to the English crown. Scotland, to protect itself, accepted alliance with England’s perennial enemy, France.
A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind.
Religious doctrines were determined not by the logic of a few but by the needs of many; they were a frame of belief within which the common man, inclined by nature to a hundred unsocial actions, could be formed into a being sufficiently disciplined and self-controlled to make society and civilization possible.
No man can be tolerant except where he is indifferent.
A religion is at its best when it must live with competition; it tends to intolerance when and where it is unchallenged and supreme.
Jews whose thirst for education and understanding gave me a new insight into their people. Less than any man have I excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds 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.