Buy the Book: This book is a compilation of Will Durant’s essays and lectures. His personal lists of the greatest thinkers, poets, books, peaks of human progress, and dates offer a journey through world history.
The Notes
- “If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.”
- “Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths… Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth.”
- “The real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and battles, nor in the even tenor of the common man; it is in the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture.”
- “I see history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man through genius with the obdurate inertia of matter and the baffling mystery of mind; the struggle to understand, control, and remake himself and the world.”
- “I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead; men carving marble into forms ennobling men; men molding peoples into better instruments of greatness; men making a language of music and music out of language; men dreaming of finer lives-and living them. Here is a process of creation more vivid than in any myth; a godliness more real than in any creed.”
- “Greatest” Thinkers
- “At every step on the stairway of progress it was thought that lifted us, slowly and tentatively, to a larger power and a higher life. If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.”
- Durant’s list considers people who had an enduring influence on humanity based on the originality, scope, veracity, depth, and most importantly, the persistence of their thought.
- Durant defines thinkers as scientists and philosophers who, through thought rather than actions, most influenced mankind.
- Confucius
- He was a moral philosopher.
- Born in 552 BC at a time when China was broken by feudal fighting. Confucius helped bring order back to his country.
- He did not believe that all men were equal. Intelligence is not universal.
- “That whereby man differs from the lower animals is little. Most people throw it away.” — Mencius, a pupil of Confucius
- “The greatest fortune of a people would be to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule them.”
- Plato
- “Why do we love Plato? Because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the intoxication of dialectical revelry, passionate seeker of the elusive reality behind thoughts and things… We love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation but for the remolding of the world.”
- He was a seeker of truth.
- Plato used Socrates as a voice for his own ideas.
- His Dialogues birthed philosophy: it covered love, friendship, life, knowledge, metaphysics, theology, ethics, psychology, education, statesmanship, art.
- “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book.” — Emerson on the Republic
- Plato influenced Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and is still taught around the world today.
- Aristotle
- He was The Philosopher.
- His writing covers everything from philosophy to science. He built a framework for philosophy and the foundation of advancing science.
- He introduced new sciences of biology, embryology, and logic.
- “Barring astronomy and medicine, the history of science begins with the encyclopedic labors of the tireless Stagyrite.”
- Dante named Aristotle “master of those who know.”
- “We shall not find again, in this tour of the world upon which we are engaged, another name that so long inspired and enthralled the minds of men.”
- Saint Thomas Aquinas
- “What Dante did to the hopes and fears of the Catholic Renaissance, Aquinas did for its thought: unifying knowledge, interpreting it, and focusing it all upon the great problems of life and death. The world does not follow him now, preferring a doubting Thomas to a dogmatic one, but there was a time when every intellect honored the Angelic Doctor, and every philosophy took his gigantic Summae as its premises.”
- Copernicus
- A Polish astronomer and mathematician.
- Theorize that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the universe. For that, he was treated as a blasphemer.
- On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs set off a revolution that forced mankind to think differently about the world and universe — everything they believed.
- “With him modernity begins. With him secularism begins. With him reason makes its French Revolution against a faith immemorially enthroned, and man commences his long effort to rebuild with thought the shattered palace of his dreams.”
- “The century that followed Copernicus was one of youthful audacity and courage in every field. Little vessels began to explore the now round and limited earth; frail minds began to explore the intellectual globe, careless of dogma, unharassed by tradition, and never dreaming that mankind would fail.”
- Sir Francis Bacon
- He transformed science from one based only on logic and reason to one based on logic and evidence.
- “who proclaimed the mission of thought as no vain scholastic dispute, no empty academic speculation, but the inductive inquiry into nature’s laws, the resolute extension of the mastery of man over the conditions of his life; the man who mapped out as with royal authority the unconquered fields of research, pointed a hundred sciences to their tasks, and foretold their unbelievable victories.”
- “From that day to ours the history of the European intellect has been predominantly the progress of the Baconian as against the medieval conception of the world.”
- Sir Isaac Newton
- Newton’s laws of motion were the basis for all practical advances that followed.
- “Newton’s Principia marked the quiet assumption, by science, of its now unchallenged mastery over modern thought.”
- “Not long ago, a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question…who was the greatest man—Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Someone answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.” — Voltaire
- Voltaire
- A prolific writer who brought the ideas of Newton, Locke, etc. to France and set off the Age of Enlightenment.
- “It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a thousand falsehoods.”
- King Louis XVI blamed Voltaire and Rousseau for his downfall.
- “Never did one man teach so many, or with such irresistible artistry.”
- “The finest genius that the ages have borne.” — Frederick the Great
- He’s been honored in the writings of Nietzsche, Anatole France, and Brandes.
- Immanuel Kant
- German philosopher born in Konigsberg.
- “It was Kant who labored best to rescue mind from matter; who argued so irrefutably (because so unintelligibly) against the uses of “pure reason” and who, by the prestidigitation of his thought, brought back to life, magician-wise, the dear beliefs of the ancient faith.”
- His influence grew in the 19th century “when rationalism and skepticism threatened the old citadels.”
- Charles Darwin
- 1859 markets the beginning of modern thought (the year Origin of the Species was published).
- “For what did Darwin do but offer, quietly, and with a disarming humility, a world-picture totally different from that which had contented the mind of man before?”
- “The surface of the earth seethed with warring species and competing individuals, every organism was the prey of some larger beast; every life was lived at the expense of some other life; great “natural” catastrophes came, ice ages, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, pestilences, famines, wars; millions and millions of living things were “weeded out,” were quickly or slowly killed. Some species and some individuals survived for a little while—this was evolution. This was nature, this was reality.”
- Honorable Mention
- Democritus, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Abelard, Galileo, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan Anthony, Diogenes, Zeno, Lassalle, Marx.
- “Greatest” Poets
- Durant admits the list is biased toward his favorites.
- “Let me not pretend to do more here than to reveal my prejudices, to record the men who, beyond all others, have brought me that strange mixture of music, emotion, imagery, and thought, which is poetry.”
- Homer
- Before the written word, history was passed down through songs and stories. Durant believes Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are a collection of those stories.
- “Every nation’s literature begins with such epics, ‘vedas,’ or ‘sagas’—Ramayanas, Mahabharatas, Nibelungenlieds, Beowulfs, or Chansons de Roland; they are as natural to a nation’s childhood as to an individual’s.”
- Homer’s epics were simple because they were meant to be heard not read.
- David/Psalms
- Psalms had many authors and was compiled nearly 1,000 years after David.
- The most influential songs ever written.
- “It is true that they complain too much.”
- Evoke humility, sorrow, strength, passion, assurance, etc.
- Euripides
- Wrote tragedies that still influence modern dramas.
- In 415 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, he wrote a play on the siege of Troy, from Troy’s perspective (the opposite of Homer’s Iliad).
- “This is a man strong enough to speak out, brave enough—in the very fever of war—to show its futile bestiality; brave enough to show the Greeks, to the Greeks, as barbarians in victory, and their enemies as heroes in defeat.”
- “If I were certain that the dead have consciousness. I would hang myself to see Euripides.” — Philemon
- “Have all the nations of the world since his time produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?” — Goethe
- Lucretius
- Four centuries after Euripides.
- The greatest poet and philosopher of Rome.
- Wrote the De Rerum Natura, a poetic essay “On the Nature of Things.”
- “He is a dark pessimist, who sees everywhere two self-canceling movements—growth and decay, reproduction and destruction, Venus and Mars, life and death. All forms begin and have their end; only atoms, space, and law remain; birth is a prelude to corruption, and even this massive universe will thaw and flow back into formlessness.”
- He suffered from melancholy and insanity and killed himself at age 45 in 55 B.C.
- “Gaiety is wiser than wisdom.”
- Li-Po
- Was one of the most important poets of the Tang Dynasty.
- “Li Tai-po, the Keats of China, had discovered the world in A.D. 701. ‘For twenty springs,’ he lived ‘among the clouds, loving leisure and enamored of the hills.’ He grew in health and strength, and became practiced in the ways of love.”
- He married but his wife and children left because he didn’t make enough money. So he traveled from city to city, drinking wine and sharing songs, until the emperor became his patron.
- “In the end, after imprisonment, condemnation to death, pardon, and every experiment in suffering, he found his way to his childhood home, only to die three years afterward. Legend, unsatisfied with a common end for so extraordinary a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.”
- Dante
- He met a girl named Beatrice in Florance when he was age 9, but Beatrice married someone else and died at 24. But he never forgot her.
- He got into politics, was exiled, and all his possessions confiscated. After 15 years of poverty, he was allowed to return only if he made an offering in the church as a released prisoner. He refused. So he was condemned and sentenced to death by fire if he was ever caught.
- “He could describe hell later because he went through every realm of it on earth, and if he painted Paradise less vividly, it was for lack of personal experience. He passed from city to city, hunted and friendless, time and again near to starvation.”
- “Nothing so cleanses the dross out of a man as the creation of beauty or the pursuit of truth, and if the two are merged in one with him, as they were with Dante, he must be purified.”
- At age 45 he wrote The Divine Comedy.
- “It would not have been medieval had it not been an allegory: our human life is always a hell, says the poet, until wisdom (Virgil) purges us of evil desire, and love (Beatrice) lifts us to happiness and peace.”
- He remained in exile until his death at 56 years old (in 1321) in Ravenna.
- “Dante was a madman, and his work is a monstrosity. He has many commentators, and therefore cannot be understood. His reputation will go on increasing, for no one ever reads him.” — Voltaire
- William Shakespeare
- “Shakespeare, who flourished in the time of Lope de Vega…is a barbarian.” — Voltaire
- “Shakespeare is a coarse and savage mind.” — Lord Shaftesbury
- “A man should never read his reviewers, nor be too curious about the verdict of posterity.”
- “His rich and riotous energy was the source of his genius and his faults; it brought him the depth and passion of his plays, and it brought him twins and an early death.”
- “No man had ever mastered language, or used it with such lordly abandon. Anglo-Saxon words, French words, Latin words, alehouse words, medical words, legal words; tripping monosyllabic lines and sonorous sesquipedalian speech; pretty ladylike euphuisms and rough idiomatic obscenities: only an Elizabethan could have dared to write such English.”
- John Keats
- “Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.‘If I should die,’ said I to myself,‘I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’” — Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1819
- “‘If I had had time’—this is the tragedy of all great men.”
- “The idea of death seems his only comfort. He talks of it with delight. The thought of recovery is beyond everything dreadful to him.” — Severn
- He suffered from tuberculosis and died at age 25, on February 23, 1821.
- “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” — Keats epitaph (dictated by himself)
- “He has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Wrote Adonais after hearing of Keats’s death.
- “For Shelley, as Sir Henry Maine would have put it, had based his life and thought on the “State of Nature,” on Rousseau’s dream of a Golden Age in which all men had been, or would be, equal.”
- “Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world?” — Trelawney
- “Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world.” — Shelley
- He died on July 8, 1822, in a storm traveling by boat across the Bay of Spezzia from Leghorn to Lerici.
- Walt Whitman
- His work was original: no rhymes, no rhythm or meter, and original matter.
- “What Homer had been to Greece, Virgil to Rome, Dante to Italy, Shakespeare to England, he was to be for America, because he dared to see in her, with all her faults, her material of song. He made for her new life a new form of verse, as loose and irregular, as flowing and strong as himself. And so truly did he see and sing that at last he became not only the poet of democracy and America, but, by the greatness of his soul and the universality of his vision, the poet of the modern world.”
- “The originality of Leaves of Grass is perhaps the most absolute which has ever been manifest in literature.” — French Critic
- He was denounced at first.
- “I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of ‘Leaves of Grass.’ I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy…. I give you joy of your free and brave thought…. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; for the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.” — Emerson writing to Whitman, July 21, 1855
- Honorable Mention
- Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Petrarch, Tasso, Omar-Fitzgerald, Chaucer, Villon, Milton, Goethe, Blake, Burns, Byron, Tennyson, Hugo, Verlaine, Heine, and Poe.
- Best Books for an Education
- “Can you spare an hour a day? Or, if some days are too crowded with life and duty to give you leisure for these subtler things, can you atone for such bookless evenings by an extra hour or two on those Sunday mornings when the endless newspaper consumes you to no end? Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.”
- Initium dimidium facti = the start is half the deed.
- “At the cost of a little unpleasantness we must make ourselves acquainted with the current scientific description of the world in which man has grown: we must have a little astronomical and biological background to give some modesty to our conception of the human race; we must learn the latest gossip about electrons and chromosomes, and look on for a moment while physics and chemistry transform the world.”
- “We have minds as well as bodies, and perhaps we should try in some measure to understand ourselves before we ponder the history of mankind.”
- “Read actively, not passively: consider at every step whether what you read accords with your own experience, and how far it may be applied to the guidance of your own life. But if you disagree with an author, or are shocked by his heresies, read on nevertheless; toleration of differences is one mark of a gentleman. Make notes of all passages that offer help toward the reconstruction of your character (not someone else’s character) or the achievement of your aims, and classify these notes in such a way that they may at any moment, and for any purpose, be ready to your hand.
- “Life without music, as Nietzsche said, would be a mistake.”
- “Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief.”
- “It is always easier to love the weak than the strong; the strong do not need our love, and instinctively we look for flaws in their irritating perfection; every statue is a provocation.”
- ” We may still believe, despite all our knowledge, that the race that made Plato and Leonardo will some day grow wisdom enough to control population, to keep the seas open to food and fuel for all peoples, and all markets open for all traders and all capital, and so by some international organization graduate humanity out of war. Stranger things than that have been accomplished in the history of mankind; forty times such a marvel could not equal the incredible development of man from slime or beast to Confucius and Christ.We have merely begun.”
- “When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world with Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats. For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answer back, and always wait our call. When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding.”
- Durant’s list is organized historically: from Greece to Rome, Middle Ages to Italian Renaissance, Reformation to Revolution, Industrial Revolution — see the book for the complete list.
- “Peaks” of Human Progress
- “There is no limit to progress except the duration of the globe upon which we are placed.” — Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet, 1794
- “Search through all ancient Greek and Latin literature, and you will find no affirmatory belief in human progress. Not until the Occident brought into the Orient the virus of—the fever of—progress can you find in any Hindu or Chinese thinker any belief in the notion that man marches forward through the years. It is a relatively new idea for men to have and to hold.”
- “Idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness.”
- “Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.”
- “The believer in progress will have to admit that we have made too many advances in the art of war, and that our politicians, with startling exceptions, would have adorned the Roman Forum in the days of Milo and Clodius.”
- “As to happiness, no man can say; it is an elusive angel, destroyed by detection and seldom amenable to measurement. Presumably it depends first upon health, secondly upon love, and thirdly upon wealth.”
- “When we look at history in the large we see it as a graph of rising and falling states—nations and cultures disappearing as on some gigantic film. But in that irregular movement of countries and that chaos of men, certain great moments stand out as the peaks and essence of human history, certain advances which, once made, were never lost.”
- Speech
- “Without words, or common nouns, that might give to particular images the ability to represent a class, generalization would have stopped in its beginnings, and reason would have stayed where we find it in the brute. Without words, philosophy and poetry, history and prose, would have been impossible, and thought could never have reached the subtlety of Einstein or Anatole France.”
- Fire
- “Fire made man independent of climate, gave him a greater compass on the earth, tempered his tools to hardness and durability, and offered him as food a thousand things inedible before. Not least of all it made him master of the night, and shed an animating brilliance over the hours of evening and dawn.”
- Conquest of Animal
- “Animals are now our playthings and our helpless food, but there was a time when man was hunted as well as hunter, when every step from cave or hut was an adventure, and the possession of the earth was still at stake. This war to make the planet human was surely the most vital in human history; by its side all other wars were but family quarrels, achieving nothing.”
- Agriculture
- When civilization began.
- Agriculture allowed humans to settle, form societies, build homes, schools, etc.
- Social Organization
- “The replacement of chaos with order, of brutality with judgment, of violence with law.”
- “God knows that our congresses and our parliaments are dubious inventions, the distilled mediocrity of the land, but despite them we manage to enjoy a security of life and property which we shall appreciate more warmly when civil war or revolution reduces us to primitive conditions.”
- “Politics is not life, but only a graft upon life.”
- Morality
- “Here we touch the very heart of our problem—are men morally better than they were? So far as intelligence is an element in morals, we have improved: the average of intelligence is higher, and there has been a great increase in the number of what we may vaguely call “developed” minds. So far as character is concerned, we have probably retrogressed: subtlety of thought has grown at the expense of stability of soul.”
- Humans are gentler and more generous today than past.
- “In one year (1928) the contributions of our country to private charity and philanthropy exceeded two billion dollars—which was then one-half of all the money circulating in America.”
- Men were hanged for stealing in England 200 years ago, miners were serfs by birth, criminals were publicly tortured, debtors were imprisoned, and Africa was raided for slaves.
- “We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and monogamy; and all the villainy and politics of five continents are gathered upon one page for the encouragement of our breakfasts.”
- Tools
- The increased production from invention allowed time for comfort and leisure to everyone that was once only available to the highest class.
- “Our present defeat by the machinery around us is a transient thing, a halt in our visible progress to a slaveless world. The menial labor that degraded both master and man is lifted from human shoulders and harnessed to the tireless muscles of iron and steel; soon every waterfall and every wind will pour its beneficent energy into factories and homes, and man will be freed for the tasks of the mind.”
- Science
- “In a large degree Buckle was right: we progress only in knowledge, and these other gifts are rooted in the slow enlightenment of the mind. Here in the untitled nobility of research, and the silent battles of the laboratory, is a story fit to balance the chicanery of politics and the futile barbarism of war.”
- “In our country the democratic passion for extreme statements turns every science into a fad.”
- See the advances in astronomy, math, engineering, physics, biology, and geology in the last 200 years.
- Education
- “More and more completely we pass on to the next generation the gathered experience of the past.”
- “We have not excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of human knowledge far beyond any age in history.”
- “Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human; we are born ridiculous and malodorous animals; we become human, we have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation, and transmission place mankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has ever reached before.”
- Writing and Print
- The written word allowed knowledge to be passed down and spread more efficiently than by word of mouth. Writing made knowledge permanent.
- “It bound the generations together with a common heritage; it created that Country of the Mind in which, because of writing, genius need not die.”
- Dates in World History
- Durant believes that a knowledgeable person should know the century of “world-transforming inventions and discoveries,” “greatest poets,” “greatest makers of music,” “greatest artists or works of art,” “greatest prose writers,” and any other “greatest” you want to add to the list.
- “If, however, one is condemned to live on a mental desert island, and can take only twelve dates with him, these dates should presumably be such as to carry in their implications the essential history of mankind. About them should cluster such associations that on their docket the greater achievements of the human mind would string themselves in a concatenation of development, in an order and perspective that would clarify old knowledge and facilitate the new.”
- 4241 BC – The Intro of the Egyptian Calendar
- It was a solar calendar that required some knowledge of astronomy and math to chart the stars and sun.
- The calendar divided the year into 12 months with 30 days each, and 5 intercalary days at the end.
- 543 BC – Death of Buddha
- “Life, said Buddha, is full of suffering; it can be made bearable only by doing no injury to any living thing, and speaking no evil of any man—or woman either… And let us take the date of Buddha as the beginning of a civilization that has known every vicissitude, every injustice, every slavery, and yet in the midst of it has produced geniuses and saints from Buddha and Asoka to Gandhi and Tagore.”
- 478 BC – Death of Confucius
- “Never has one man so written his name upon the face and spirit of a people as Confucius has done in China. Let us take him again as a symbol and a suggestion: behind him are the delicate lyrics of the T’ang Dynasty’s poets, the mystic landscapes of the Chinese painters, the perfect vases of the Chinese potters, the secular and terrestrial wisdom of the Chinese philosophers; perhaps the greatest of all historic civilizations is summed up in his name.”
- 399 BC – Death of Socrates
- “I want some stopping-point in history that shall bring to my memory a few of the thousand facets of this brave and varied age, when for the first time a whole civilization liberated itself from superstition, and created science, drama, democracy, and liberty, and passed on to Rome and Europe half of our intellectual and aesthetic heritage.”
- 44 BC – Death of Caesar
- “The death of Caesar stands as the door to the Golden Age of Rome.”
- Ceasar’s death led to Rome’s legacy of Roman law, Pax Romana, Virgil, Horace, Pliny, Tacitus, Epictetus, Aurelius, Roman architecture and art, and building of roads.
- 6 BC – Birth of Christ
- “For us it is the most important date of all, because it divides all history in the West, gives us our greatest hero and model, provides us with that body of myth and legend which is now passing from the theological to the literary stage, and marks the beginning of that Christian age which seems today to be approaching its close. After us the deluge; God knows what a mess of occult faiths will in the present century replace the tender and cruel theologies that praised and dishonored Christ.”
- 632 AD – Death of Mohammed
- Founded the faith that dominated northern Africa, southern Europe, and half of Asia for centuries.
- “Even Christianity cannot boast of so many wars waged in its name, or so many heathen killed.”
- 1294 – Death of Roger Bacon
- Marks the first use of gunpowder as a tool of mass destruction.
- “One may cause to burst forth from bronze thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a terrible explosion accompanied by brilliant light. One may multiply the phenomena so far as to destroy an army or a city.” — Bacon
- “Perhaps this is the most important date in the story of the fall of man; though some cynic might argue that a still more tragic event was the invention of thinking, the liberation of intellect from instinct, the consequent separation of sex from reproduction, and the abandonment of the perpetuation of the race to the selected morons of every land.”
- 1454 – Press of Johannes Gutenberg Issues First Printed Documents Bearing a Printed Date
- The movable type existed 14 years before in Germany and China had printed paper back to 1041 AD.
- The date marks how much the printed world transformed Europe and influenced the New World with the Reformation, spreading of ideas, and free thought.
- “One hardly knows, today, whether printing does more harm than good, or whether the growth of knowledge and learning has not weakened character as much as it has stocked the mind—but let us try it a little further!”
- 1492 – Columbus Discovers America
- Marks the discovery of the Americas, new trade routes, and mass wealth to Spain, England, Netherlands, France, and Italy — along with the trickle-down effects that wealth had on the arts.
- It opened new markets in the New World for European goods and allowed for mass migration of Europe’s people.
- “All the history of America, with its experiments in popular sovereignty and popular education (would that the order had been reversed), lay potential in that magnificent adventure of 1492.”
- 1769 – James Watt Brings the Steam Engine to Practical Utility
- Marks the Industrial Revolution.
- “Essentially there are only two fundamental and pivotal events in human history: the Agricultural Revolution, in which men passed from hunting to tillage and settled down to build homes, schools, and civilization; and the Industrial Revolution, which threw millions and millions of men, first in England, then in America and Germany, then in Italy and France, then in far away Japan, now in China, the Soviet Union, and India, out of their homes and their farms into cities and factories.”
- The Industrial Revolution shifted wealth from aristocrats to inventors and business owners.
- It changed government and society.
- It influenced science and discovery and how people thought.
- It put men and women to work.
- It transformed economies and complicated marriage, families, and religion.
- “Capitalism, Socialism, the Imperialism that must come when industrialized nations need foreign markets and foreign food, the wars that must come for these markets, and the revolutions that must come from these wars. Even the Great War, and the vast experiment in Russia, were corollaries of the Industrial Revolution. Seventeen-sixty-nine stands for the whole modern age.”
- 1789 – French Revolution
- Marks the Age of Enlightenment that influenced the French and American Revolutions.
- “Thought became free and boundless and fought its way out of superstition and ecclesiasticism to the time when a whole age would be named after a writer, and Voltaire might say, ‘I have no scepter, but I have a pen.’”
- “I never cease admiring the French Enlightenment; all in all I consider it the peak of human history, greater even than Periclean Greece, or Augustan Rome, or Medicean Italy. Never had men thought so bravely, spoken so brilliantly, or lifted themselves to a greater height of culture and courtesy.”
- “May my son study history, for it is the only true psychology, and the only true philosophy.” — Napoleon
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