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by
Will Durant
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June 18 - July 22, 2019
who had learned nothing from history and had forgotten everything but their privileges.
In the revolution that dethroned his master, he forfeited position, fortune, and home, and was cast into prison; but, falling ill, he was allowed to end his days in the monastery of St. Saviour “in Chora” (i.e., in the fields), whose walls he had ennobled with some of the fairest mosaics in Byzantine history.
Pletho did not know that religions are born, not made.
if the sky should fall they would hold it up with their spears.
No other government ever so fully deserved to fall as the Byzantine.
In one sense nothing was lost; only the dead had died. Byzantium had finished its role, and yielded its place, in the heroic and sanguinary, noble and ignominious procession of mankind.
The Sodalitas Litteraria Danubia, founded at Buda in 1497, is among the oldest literary societies in the world.
The Bibliotheca Corvina, which held 10,000 volumes when Matthias died, was the finest fifteenth-century library outside of Italy.
From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
Maria de Padilla, whose beauty, legend assures us, was so intoxicating that the cavaliers of the court drank with ecstasy the water in which she had bathed.
But we do nations injustice when we judge them from their kings, who agreed with Machiavelli that morals are not made for sovereigns.
But the Spaniards, like the modern (unlike the Elizabethan) English, took their pleasures sadly;
“The world is supported by four things: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the good, and the valor of the brave.”
“Tell your sovereigns that the kings of Granada who paid tribute are dead. Our mint now coins nothing but sword blades!
“You do well to weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man.”19
Their complementary qualities made Ferdinand and Isabella the most effective royal couple in history.
“The King of France,” he said grimly, “complains that I have twice deceived him. He lies, the fool; I have deceived him ten times, and more.”
We are today so uncertain and diverse in our opinions as to the origin and destiny of the world and man that we have ceased, in most countries, to punish people for differing from us in their religious beliefs.
Our present intolerance is rather for those who question our economic or political principles, and we explain our frightened dogmatism on the ground that any doubt thrown upon these cherished assumptions endangers our national solidarity and survival.
Each group was hardened by certainty into intolerance, and branded the others as infidels.
The idea that the persecution of beliefs is always ineffective is a delusion;
Both the Inquisition and the witch-burning were expressions of an age afflicted with homicidal certainty in theology, as the patriotic massacres of our era may be due in part to homicidal certainty in ethnic or political theory.
We must try to understand such movements in terms of their time, but they seem to us now the most unforgivable of historic crimes.
A supreme and unchallengeable faith is a deadly enemy ...
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Loving honors above honor, Manuel consented, and ordered all Jews and Moors in his realm to accept baptism or banishment
Genius is an individual endowment of force and will, hot it is also a social heredity of discipline and skills formed in time and absorbed m growth. Genius is born and made
Many people, said Nicole, are credulous of magic because they lack acquaintance with natural causes and processes. They accept on hearsay what they have not seen,
the wide prevalence of a belief is no proof of its truth. Even if many persons claim to have witnessed an event contrary to our ordinary experience of nature, we should hesitate to believe them. Moreover, the senses are so easily deceived!
flogging was the staff of instruction.
(egenorum multitudo—“a multitude of needy people”);
At this critical juncture a baptized Jew prodded the march of history. Luis de Santander, finance minister to Ferdinand, reproached Isabella for lack of imagination and enterprise, tempted her with the prospect of converting Asia to Christianity, and proposed to finance the expedition himself with the aid of his friends.
The weather was kindly, “like April in Andalusia,” Columbus noted in his log; “the only thing wanting was to hear nightingales.”
No man had ever so remade the map of the earth.
But wherever he was he had one foot elsewhere.
real Christianity which, in the judgment of reformers and humanists alike, had been overlaid and concealed by the dogmas and accretions of centuries.
“I suffered shipwreck,” he said, “before I went to sea.”
The revival of learning—i.e., of ancient literature—had set a fashion of adorning one’s opinions with a snatch from some Greek or Latin author; we see the custom in extreme form in Montaigne’s Essays and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; it lingered into the eighteenth century in the forensic oratory of England.
He preferred to beg in freedom rather than decay in bonds.
The two humanists, mourning for humanity, returned to London.15
Erasmus reckoned monarchy the least evil form of government; he feared the people as a “fickle, many-headed monster,” deprecated the popular discussion of laws and politics, and judged the chaos of revolution worse than the tyranny of kings.45
“We shall better overcome the Turks by the piety of our lives than by arms; the empire of Christianity will thus be defended by the same means by which it was originally established.”
“What does war beget except war?—but civility invites civility, justice invites justice.”
There is no peace, even unjust, which is not preferable to the most just of wars.
Princes and generals may profit from war, but the masses bear the tragedies and the costs.
Erasmus called nationalism a curse to humanity,
The function of Erasmus was to cut dead branches from the tree of life rather than to construct a positive and consistent philosophy.
“Piety,” he wrote, “requires that we should sometimes conceal truth, that we should take care not to show it always, as if it did not matter when, where, or to whom we show it.... Perhaps we must admit with Plato that lies are useful to the people.”
He asked the Church to reduce the essential dogmas of Christianity to as “few as possible, leaving opinion free on the rest.”
My home is where I have my library.”
he was unable to will the means as well as to wish the ends;
