“'Nature' is a term that may lend itself to any ethic and any theology; it fits the science of Darwin and the unmorality of Nietzsche more snugly than the sweet reasonableness of Lao Tzu and Christ.”

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“A nation, like an individual, can be too sensible, too prosaically sane and unbearably right... an intellectual bureaucracy irksome and hostile to every free and creatively erring soul.”

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“A vigorous soldier-emperor, Huangdi, in a reign of a mere century, gave China the magnet and the wheel, appointed official historians, built the first brick structures in China, erected an observatory for the study of the stars, corrected the calendar, and redistributed the land.”

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“Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities, slavery had been unknown”

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“Almost the only important work of metaphysics in its literature is the strange document with which the recorded history of Chinese thought begins—the I Ching, or 'Book of Changes.' All science and history were contained in the changeful interplay of the combinations; all wisdom lay hidden in the 64 hsiangs... all reality could be reduced to the opposition and union of these two basic factors—the male and female principles, the yang and the yin.”

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“Ancient civilizations were little isles in a sea of barbarism, prosperous settlements surrounded by hungry, envious and warlike hunters and herders”

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“As India is par excellence the land of metaphysics and religion, China is by like preeminence the home of humanistic, or non-theological philosophy.”

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“Barbarism is always around civilization, amidst it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migrations, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat”

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“Civilization, like life, destroys what it has perfected... alternation between centralized and decentralized power is one of the cyclical rhythms of history”

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“Despite much research, we cannot tell of what race the Sumerians were, nor by what route they entered Sumeria... a synthesis of rough beginnings and occasional but brilliant mastery... Here within the limits of our present understanding [we find] the first states and empires, the first irrigation, the first use of gold and silver, the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first code of law, the first extensive development of writing, the first libraries and schools, the first literature and poetry, the first cosmetics and jewelry, the first sculpture, the first palaces and temples... the first large scale sins of civilization: slavery, despotism, ecclesiasticism, and imperialistic war.”

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“Dying, [Fu Xi] appointed as his successor [Shen Nung] who introduced agriculture, invented the wooden plow, established markets and trade, and developed the science of medicine from the curative value of plants.”

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“Emperor Fu Xi—with the help of his enlightened Queen—taught his people marriage, music, writing, painting, fishing with nets, the domestication of animals, and the feeding of silkworms for the secretion of silk.”

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“Greece did not begin civilization—it inherited far more civilization than it began; it was the spoiled heir of three millenniums of arts and sciences brought to its cities from the Near East... the real founders of European and American civilization.”

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“In some existing tribes and probably in the earliest human groups, the physiological role of the male in reproduction appears to have escaped notice quite as completely as among animals who rut and mate and breed with happy unconsciousness of cause and effect.”

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“In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil, every event has effects forever.”

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“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”

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“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, invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths.”

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“It is no discredit to our species that in all ages its curiosity has outrun its wisdom, and its ideals have set an impossible pace for its behavior.”

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“it is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages”

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“Just as Shankara in 8th century India brought the scattered insights of the Upanishads into an intellectual system; and just as Aquinas in 13th century Europe wove Aristotle and St. Paul into the Scholastic philosophy; so Zhu Xi took the loose apothegms of Confucius and built upon them a system of philosophy strong enough to preserve for 7 centuries the Confucian leadership in Chinese political and intellectual life.”

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“Kangxi gave China the most prosperous, peaceful, and enlightened reign in the nation's history.”

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“legend, which loves personalities more than ideas, attributes to a few individuals the laborious advances of many generations.”

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“Like Voltaire, Mencius preferred monarchy to democracy, on the ground that in democracy it is necessary to educate all if the government is to succeed, while under monarchy it is only required that the philosopher should bring one man—the king—to wisdom in order to produce the perfect state.”

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“Marriage began as a form of the law of property, as a part of the institution of slavery.”

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“Most economic advances in early society were made by the woman rather than the man… she developed agriculture, made cotton cloth, developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery, woodworking, building, primitive trade, and slowly added man to her list of domesticated animals training him in those social dispositions which are the psychological basis and cement of civilization.”

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“No language has ever had a word for a virgin man.”

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“No man would believe them; and the people of Venice gave to the youngest and most garrulous of them the nickname 'Marco Millions,' because his tale was full of numbers so large and marvelous. Marco accepted this fate with good cheer, for they had brought back with them many precious stones that gave them such wealth”

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“Only in Christianity and in Buddhism can we find again so heroic an effort to transmute into decency the natural brutality of men.”

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“Popular theologians took the misty doctrine of Lao Tzu and gradually transformed it into a religion. People flocked to it, built temples, supported its priesthood and poured into the new faith their inexhaustible superstitious lore. Lao Tzu was made a god... For a thousand years the Taoist faith had millions of adherents, converted many emperors, and fought long battle of intrigue to wrest from the Confucians the divine right to tax and spend.”

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“Powerful economic motives must have favored the evolution of marriage. In all probability... connected with the rising institution of property.”

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“The advance from the hoe to the plough put a premium upon physical strength and enabled the man to assert his supremacy leading to the sexual subordination of woman… mother-right yielded to father-right… The gods, who had been mostly feminine, became great bearded patriarchs… the man was lord, the woman was servant.”

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“The civilization of Babylonia was not as fruitful for humanity as Egypt’s, not as varied and profound as India’s not as subtle and mature as China’s. And yet is was from Babylonia, rather than from Egypt, that the roving Greeks brought to their city-states—and from there to Rome and ourselves—the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, grammar, lexicography, archeology, history, and philosophy… the civilization of the Land between the Rivers passed down into the cultural endowment of our race.”

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“the essential government of mankind remains in that most deep-rooted of all historic institutions, the family.”

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“The first real person in known history is not a conqueror or a king but an artist and a scientist — Imhotep, physician, architect and chief adviser of King Zoser”

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“The first stage in the evolution of law is personal revenge... It appears in Roman and Mosaic Law, the Code of Hammurabi... and lurks behind most legal punishments even in our day. The second step was the substitution of damages for revenge.”

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“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

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“The laws of Hammurabi became for all ancient societies a legacy comparable to Rome's gift of order and government to the modern world.”

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“the majestic monotheism of the founder [Zarathustra] became - as in the case of Christianity - the polytheism of the people”

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“the natural inequality of men was producing a new degree of comfort and luxury for the strong, and a new routine of hard and disciplined labor for the rest. The theme was struck on which history would strum its myriad variations.”

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“The position of women in early societies was one of subjection verging upon slavery. Her periodic disability, her unfamiliarity with weapons, the biological absorption of her strength in carrying, nurturing, and rearing children, handicapped her in the war of the sexes and doomed her to a subordinate status”

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“The success of Confucius was posthumous, but complete… after death had removed the possibility of his insisting upon its realization… and for 2000 years, the doctrine of Confucius moved and dominated the Chinese mind.”

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“There are three things which are unfilial and the greatest of them is to have no posterity.”

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“There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.”

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“They botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.”

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“This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.”

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“Through the Phoenicians, the Syrians and the Jews, through the Cretans, the Greeks and the Romans, what the civilization of Egypt accomplished at the very dawn of history has influence in every nation and every age... agriculture, metallurgy, industry and engineering; the apparent invention of glass and linen, of paper and ink, of the calendar and the clock, of geometry and the alphabet... of census and post... the first cry fro social justice, the first widespread monogamy, the first monotheism, the first essays in moral philosophy”

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“Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.”

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