Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Outline of History

By H. G. Wells

Modeled on Diderot’s Encyclopédie and an inspiration for the Durants’ Story of Civilization, the Outline of History puts the whole of human struggle, misstep, and progress into an easily readable story. From the first living organisms to modern times, it traces the clash of civilization against civilization, of technology against nature, of awakened awareness against politics and religion concluding with the need for cooperation, with the necessity of us all becoming Citizens of the World.

Themes

Themes: History

Quotes from Outline of History

Travels of Marco Polo is one of the great books of history. It opens this world of the 13th century to our imaginations— it led directly to the discovery of America... [it gave Columbus] an exaggerated idea of the extent of Asia... and this project of sailing into the sunset became the ruling purpose of his life.”

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Ashoka's reign was one of the brightest interludes in the troubled history of mankind... For 28 years he worked sanely for the real needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, the name of Asoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star... the only military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after victory... his life was devoted to the spreading of Buddhism throughout the world.

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“After his death, Lao Tzu’s teachings were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them.”

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Themes: Taoism

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“Another great deficiency of the democratic machinery of the Roman Republic was the absence of any general elementary political education at all... The ordinary Roman was not only blankly ignorant of the history of mankind but also of the conditions of foreign peoples”

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Themes: Nationalism

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“Buddha called men to self-forgetfulness five hundred years before Christ. In some ways he was near to us and our needs. Buddha was more lucid upon our individual importance in service than Christ, and less ambiguous upon the question of personal immortality... You see clearly a man, simple, devout, lonely, battling for light, a vivid human personality, not a myth.”

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Themes: Immortality

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“Buddhism has done more for the advance of world civilization and true culture than any other influence in the chronicles of mankind... It is beyond all disputes the achievement of one of the most penetrating intelligence the world has ever known.”

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Themes: Buddhism

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“Decartes, the greatest of French philosophers... is the central and dominant figure of a constellation of speculative minds which were active in undermining, modifying, and dwarfing the genteel Christianity of their age.”

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“Demosthenes, the Athenian demagogue and orator, a man of reckless rhetoric”

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“early socialism was not at first at all 'democratic.' The democratic idea was mixed up with it later... its early form patriarchal... the first socialism was not a workers' movement; it was a masters' movement.”

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Themes: Socialism

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“Gibbon's design for this great work demanded a prelude of splendor and tranquility and he makes the most of it in the sunny review of Antonines with which he opens. But he was far too shrewd and subtle not to qualify his apparent approval of the conditions he describes.”

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“His life has some interesting parallelism with that of some of the more political of the Greek philosophers... He was far more of a constructive political thinker than the Buddha or Lao Tzu. His mind was full of the condition of China, and he sought to call the Aristocratic Man into existence very largely in order to produce the noble state.”

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“If men and women do not cling to their families nowadays as much as they did, it is because the state and the community supply now safety and help and facilities that were once only possible in the family group.”

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Themes: Family

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“If we look into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and things within, and blind to the future.”

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“It is possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teachings of Gautama , revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny”

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“Neither Gautama nor Lao Tzu nor Confucius had any inkling of this idea of a jealous God who would not tolerate any lurking belief in magic or old customs… The intolerance of the Jewish mind did keep its essential faith clear and clean”

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“Occam was insistent upon this separation of theology and practical truth—a separation which manifestly released scientific inquiry from dogmatic control.”

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Themes: Control

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“Ovid and Horace challenge comparison with the best elegiac and lyric poets of Greece.”

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“Politically, Islam was not an advance but a retrogression from the traditional freedoms and customary laws of the desert... it's master has always been whatever man was vigorous and unscrupulous enough. Subject to revolts and assassinations, its final law has always been that man's will.”

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“Queen Hatasu... one of the most extraordinary and able of Egyptian monarchs”

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“Rousseau, another outcast spirit, with his sentimental attack on formal morals and his sentimental idealization of nature and freedom, stands out as the master novelist of his time and country... [his] intellectual influence was on the whole demoralizing [and he] did much to popularize a sentimental and declamatory method of dealing with social and political problems.”

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“Shakespeare was a man of keen humor and great sweetness of mind, who turned every sentence he wrote into melody. Elizabethan drama... found its extreme exponent in Shakespeare whose richest, subtlest passages are drawn from homely and even vulgar life.”

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“Some writers—impressed by the artificial splendors of the European courts—feel that Benjamin Franklin at the court of Louis XVI with his long hair, his plain clothes, and his pawky manner, was sadly lacking in aristocratic distinction. But, stripped to their personalities, Louis XVI was hardly gifted enough or noble minded enough to be Franklin's valet.”

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“The complicated household of Muhammad was like an evil legacy... He was an illiterate Arab, ignorant of history, totally ignorant of all the political experience of Rome and Greece, and almost as ignorant of the real history of Judea; and he left his followers with no scheme for a stable government”

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“The idea of a Promise gave to Judaism a quality no previous or contemporary religion displayed; it made Judaism historical and dramatic. It justified its fierce intolerance…”

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Themes: Judaism

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“The incuriousness—the complete absence of science—of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even than their architecture... Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its' gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of India, China, Persia, Buddha or Zoroaster...”

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“The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?”

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Themes: Socialism

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“The prestige of Greek learning of an approved and settled type was as high in the Rome of Antoninus Pius as it was in the Oxford and Cambridge of Victorian England. The Greek scholar received the same mixture of unintelligent deference and practical contempt.”

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“the renewed study of the Greek classics was bringing the creative and fertilizing spirit of Plato to pear upon the Western mind. In England, Sir Thomas More produced a quaint imitation of Plato's Repbulic in his Utopia, setting out a sort of autocratic communism”

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Themes: Shambhala

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“the teaching of Confucius was not so overlaid, because it was limited and planin and straightforward and lent itself to no such distortions.”

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Themes: Confucianism

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“The very real spirit of democracy (using the word in its modern sense) pervades the essential teaching of Islam but Mohammad left no effective form to express this and his own rule was unlimited autocracy, and autocratic Islam has remained.”

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Themes: Democracy

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“There was a thin, small stream of fine learning and of fine thinking up to the 1st century—witness Lucretius and Cicero—but it did not spread into the mass of the people... the broad principles of modern geology shine through the speculations of Lucretius; [but] the true figure to represent the classical Roman attitude to science is not Lucretius, but that Roman soldier who hacked Archimedes to death”

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“What we may call the idea of Isocrates—the idea of a great union of the Greek states in Europe to dominate the Eastern world”

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“When Napoleon set up his brother Joseph upon the Spanish throne in 1810, the Washington of South America was General Bolivar and Spain was unable to suppress his revolt”

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Themes: Revolution

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“Winston Churchill, whose speeches were in themselves part of Britain’s defenses… and there had been no such complete enrollment of all citizens since the days of Sparta… But words, no more than money, win wars.”

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“With Sophocles came a third actor; the dialog and acting were developed and the chorus became subordinate to the dramatic action… Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are the cultivating names of Greek tragedy, but now only the unmeaning names to the reader who will not seek out their work.”

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Historians / Journalists

Quotes about Outline of History (2 quotes)

The Outline of History is an attempt to tell truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind, so far as it is known today. It is written plainly for the general reader”

H. G. Wells 1866 – 1946 CE
A father of science fiction and One World Government apostle

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“Are we to be fed on predigested food, in the fashion of an American breakfast? Worse still, The Outline of History—bugbear of all proper historians—is unforgivable.”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, 1968

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