Tao Te Ching
Age of Napoleon
The last volume in the Durants' wonderful series, The Story of Civilization, this book captures the enigmatic, brilliant, and foolish figure of Napoleon and his age between 1789 and 1815. Beginning with the French Revolution and ending with Napoleon's great fall that heralded our modern age, this history describes the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the transformations of ancient monarchies into modern states, the golden age of English power—a time when the ancient power structures transformed into modern states. And as they always do, the Durants' descriptions of the political machinations become put into the context of art, music, science, and cultural change.
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Quotes from Age of Napoleon
“Byron loved history—cleansed of nationalism and mythology—as the only truth about man... (Shelley ignored it, being wedded to an ideal uncomfortable with history). He made friends readily, for he was attractive in person and manners, fascinating in conversation, widely informed in literature and history, and more faithful to his friends than to his mistresses... Despite all his skeptical intelligence he succumbed again and again to the magnet that every healthy woman is to any healthy man.”
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“Few great men have remained, after death, what they had been during their lives... Napoleon had served to embody his country's need for order after a riot of freedom... a dictator almost larger than history... he became after his death... mouthpiece of the recurrent cry for liberty... the most persuasive apostle of freedom.”
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“He remains the outstanding figure of his time, with something noble about him that survives despite his selfishness in power... He thought we should not see his like for 500 years. We hope not; and yet it is good—and enough—to behold and suffer, once in a millennium, the power and limits of the human mind.”
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“In 1807 romance was spreading its wings; romantic love was struggling to be freed from parental power, economic bonds, and moreal taboos; the rights of women were beginning to find voice.”
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“Love generated by physical attraction of boy and girl is an accident of hormones and propinquity; to found a lasting marriage upon such a haphazard and transitory condition is ridiculous.”
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“Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.”
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“Self-preservation remains the basic law of life. Within that limit, the philosopher may seek to practice his trade, which is to understand and forgive.”
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“The rival hungers that found clearest voice in the French Revolution: the hunger for freedom—of movement, growth, enterprise, worship, thought, speech, and press; and the hunger for equality—of access to opportunity, education, health, and legal justice... the hunger for liberty to the detriment of equality; the hunger for equality, at the cost of liberty... freeing individualism to the point of a destructive disorder, and freeing superior ability to repeated crises of concentrated wealth... no discipline has checked the similar disorder in our times.”
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“Truth is seldom simple; often it has a right and a left hand, and moves on two feet.”
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“Was there ever, since Ashoka, a major war in which one nation admitted the superior justice of the enemy's cause? It is part of the average citizen's nature to make his God a particeps criminis in the wars of his country. And no superstate could solve the problem, for some of our greatest wars have been civil.”
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“What thoughtful person has not at 50 discarded the dogmas he swore by in his youth and will not at 80 smile at the 'mature' views of his middle age?”
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“The greatest historians of our time—who have lived their own fascinating true-life 'love story' (since she was his 15-year old student)— and recipients of the Pulitzer Prize; they have produced 11 best-selling masterworks of history in 40 years… and recently completed (at ages 90 and 77) their final classic, The Age of Napoleon. They were married in City Hall, he carrying a briefcase swollen with books on philosophy and she holding her roller skates. Their marriage became a working literary partnership. In the early years she was secretary, researcher, assistant and editor. That led eventually to co-authorship. They have produced a total of 7 books together, and Mr. Durant alone has written 17. His The Story of Philosophy has been continuously in print since it was first published in 1928 and has sold more than 3 million copies in 19 languages [by 1975]”
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