“The failure of the reformation to capture France had left for the Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.”

“Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on. The decay of one civilization, as of one individual, makes room for the growth of another; life sheds the old skin, and surprises death with fresh youth. Greek civilization is alive; it moves in every breath of mind that we breathe, so much of it remains that none of us in one lifetime could absorb it all. We know its defects—its insane and pitiless wars, its stagnate slavery, its subjection of woman, its lack of moral restraint, its corrupt individualism, its tragic failure to unite liberty with order and peace. But those who cherish freedom, reason, and beauty will not linger over these blemishes. They will think of Greece as … our nourishment and our life.”

"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution."

Durant's 10 greatest "thinkers"
#1	#2	#3	#4	#5	#6	#7	#8	#9	#10
Confucius	Plato	Aristotle	Copernicus	Aquinas	Bacon	Newton	Voltaire	Kant	Darwin
IQ=170	IQ=180	IQ=195	IQ=190	IQ=165	IQ=180	IQ=215	IQ=195	IQ=180	IQ=175

“Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.”