Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state.Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Part 1 – Our Oriental Heritage (1935), Chapter 3, Section 1.He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. Man is not willingly a political animal.… Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
I do not need to be told how absurd this enterprise is, nor how immodest is its very conception … Nevertheless I have dreamed that despite the many errors inevitable in this undertaking, it may be of some use to those upon whom the passion for philosophy has laid the compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and understanding through history in time, as well as to seek them through science in space. I wish to tell as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the contributions that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of mankind – to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes, character and effects, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the experiments in government, the aspirations of religion, the mutations of morals and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the development of science, the wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of art.Quotes I - Our Oriental Heritage (1935) Our Oriental Heritage online at the Internet Archive 1.1.3.4 XVIII : The Paradise of the Gods.1.1.3.2 XVI : From Alexander to Aurangzeb.1.1.1 The Establishment of Civilization.
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