The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

The world’s woes, he felt, were largely due to mysticism, to culpable obscurity of thought; and the first law of morality should be, to think straight. “Better the world should perish than that I, or any other human being, should believe a lie; . . . that is the religion of thought, in whose scorching flames the dross of the world is being burnt away.”

Bertrand Russell

“Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoan to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoan, who gives us this assurance.”

Nailed it.

The “free man” cannot comfort himself with childish hopes and anthropomorphic gods; he has to keep his courage up even though he knows that in the end he too must die, that all things must die. Nevertheless, he will not surrender; if he cannot win, he can at least enjoy the fight; and by the knowledge that foresees his own defeat he stands superior to the blind forces that will destroy him.

Life and knowledge are today so complex, that only by free discussion can we pick our way through errors and prejudices to that total perspective which is truth.

hatred and war come largely of fixed ideas or dogmatic faith. Freedom of thought and speech would go like a cleansing draught through the neuroses and superstitions of the “modern” mind.

we are not so educated as we think;

we think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind.

The distinctive feature of the unintelligent man is the hastiness and absoluteness of his opinions; the scientist is slow to believe, and never speaks without modification.

“The instinctive part of our character is very malleable. It may be changed by beliefs, by material circumstances, by social circumstances, and by institutions.” It is quite conceivable, for example, that education could mould opinion to admire art more than wealth, as in the days of the Renaissance,

There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character. This, and not violent revolution, or paper legislation, is the way out of economic greed and international brutality.

Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia.

Art can only be the flower that grows out of wealth; it cannot be wealth’s substitute. The Medici came before Michelangelo.