Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God

by Will Durant

In the South a black man might at any time be killed by a white man, who ran little risk of being convicted (if ever arrested) by a jury of his “peers”—i.e., all whites. A black person wishing to register as a voter was frustrated by a score of discriminatory requirements;

There’s been no change

labor

I believe that the nonwhite mind and character are as capable of improvement as any, provided that they have not been stunted by a hostile environment.

I wonder how this author would do an implicit bias scale

Do we not owe it to conscience and justice that every person—irrespective of their race—has full and equal opportunity to enter into the promise of American life?

I claim that I have often been aroused by the beauty of a woman without desiring her in any physical sense or degree; according to me my excitement was purely esthetic. Perhaps I deceive myself, and I will take no oath as to the lusts hiding in my “unconscious” or in my blood.

I am abnormally excited by any form of beauty;

women have faults.

Yikes!!!!

Intellect is sharpened in men by economic competition or political finagling; women do not need so much of it because they are normally destined to motherhood, in which instinct rules; and usually they win by instinct all that the male has acquired by intellect.

This entire chapter is wierd

to choose a suitor who does not stupefy her with adoration but, by his stability, restraint, and economic sense, gives promise of being a faithful husband, a competent provider, a sound and sane father for their children.

dare not look into her eyes, for fear they will lure me into depths—if only of bathos—from which there is no return.

The grace of her movement is poetry become flesh; I gape intoxicated at the fluid ease of her walk across the room, as if some silent and invisible zephyr made her weightless on her toes.

A mother does not have to ask if life has any meaning; when she sees her children growing in body and mind she knows that she is fulfilling her destiny, and that her destiny is fulfilling

Do the. Others agree that motherhoods is the thing that MOST gratifies them?

Why am I so infatuated with women? Why

Concealment makes every revelation a thrilling gift. We might imagine

when the basic quest has been satisfied, and man can turn his thoughts away from food and money, his soul lies open to all the lure and tyranny of sex. Consequently those nations—America,

the unconscious purpose of our eating is to preserve and develop us for biological maturity—i.e., the ability to reproduce.

Sometimes I resent the power that the sexual instinct has over us; I see it ruining lives, disordering states, making agitated apes of would-be philosophers; and I can understand why past civilizations have labored,

I am not sure that I would want our sexual sensitivity to be reduced, for it is half the zest of life. Probably

To condemn sexual sensitivity would be to outlaw esthetic feeling and response, and so to cut the richest

Do we REALLY have a fighting instinct?