Learn more about books with this collection
How to avoid email overload
How to organize your inbox
How to write effective emails
Religion & History
- Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under.
- Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. It was fear that first made the gods. Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state.
- Religion has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence.
- Destroy that hope, and class war is intensified. Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up. Puritanism and paganism—the repression and the expression of the senses and desires—alternate in mutual reaction in history.
- Generally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order.
- There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
- As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
4
9 reads
MORE IDEAS ON THIS
Biology & History
- History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea.
- We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive.
- So the first biological lesson o...
4
14 reads
Character & History
- Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states.
- Human beings are normally equipped by “nature” with positive and negative instincts, whose function it is to preserve the individual, the family, the group...
4
8 reads
Government & History
- Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternati...
4
1 read
History & The Earth
- Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty.
- History is subject to geology.
- Climate no longer controls us but it limits us.
- Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home.
- The influence of geographi...
5
44 reads
Economics & History
- All economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
4
13 reads
Hesitations
- The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.
- We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.
- Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of ...
4
19 reads
History & War
- War is one of the constants of History and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. “Polemos pater panton” said Heracleitus; war, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states.
- Peace is an unstable equilibrium,...
4
10 reads
CURATED FROM
IDEAS CURATED BY
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Personalized microlearning
—
100+ Learning Journeys
—
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates