Quotes from Arthur Herman

armed forces. Compared to the Soviet Union or Great Britain, more women remained at home rather than going to work—more than 60 percent. And the United States converted the least of all its economic output to the war effort, just over 47 percent in 1944 compared to almost 60 percent for Britain and more for Germany and the Soviet Union, only to outproduce everyone else put together, including Japan.5

Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

The Prince. Some would insist that the book was inspired by the devil.25 But Machiavelli was only a close student of Aristotle's version of civic liberty, which led him in the wake of Savonarola's fall to ask some uncomfortable questions. What if God really didn't care whether Florence survived as a republic or not? What if God didn't really care whether men lived as free men or slaves? And what if human nature suits us as much for servitude as it does for liberty?

their reliance on a loyal circle of uncles and aunts, nephews and sons-in-law, to pool capital and lay off risk.

Young Niccolò had been bred to read the classics and believe in the ideal of civic humanism, even though that ideal was contradicted everywhere he looked.26 Then came 1492 and Savonarola. The republic had been reborn; it even managed to survive the disgrace and death of its would-be messiah.

Isaac Newton was hardly the person people would pick to be the cultural guru of his age. Everyone recognized that this son of a clergyman from northwestern England (born the same year Galileo died, in 1642) was an incredible math prodigy.

But that community still exists, Aristotle argues, in order to make the householder happy, rather than the other way around.

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history's record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato's Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli's ambition was to present them to posterity

They were Whigs (Shaftesbury's father had even been founder of the Whig Party), not just because they were strong Protestants but because they believed, contrary to Berkeley, that men were born with a desire to be free, in their own lives and in their political arrangements.

Tobacco Lords' success lay in their balance sheets: their ability to summon up capital from a wide variety of sources, while ruthlessly cutting costs. Investment money for ships, warehouses, and inventories (since Scottish firms, unlike their English rivals, bought the tobacco from planters outright instead of selling it abroad on commission) came from a wide variety of sources, including banks set up to finance the trade.

As we continue to specialize and become increasingly more productive, the fruits of our labor are no longer things we consume ourselves. They become "commodities," literally the things that make our lives comfortable, which we buy and sell in exchange for other goods.

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

For Aristotle, diversity is the keynote of the free society, and free exchange lies at its heart. In the true (as opposed to the ideal) political community there must be a diversity of social roles

crucial for understanding that more celebrated book. For in writing the Discourses, Machiavelli discovered a basic paradox: When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success.

And every minute Newton didn't spend working on optics, physics, astronomy (including inventing the reflecting telescope), some harmless alchemy, and other sidebars of his mathematical discipline, he spent furtively studying the Bible and church history.

Aristotle's free society is one in which the citizens participate in their government rather than submit to it. All will be rulers in one way or another, at one time or another. "This means some rule, and others are ruled, in turn, as if they had become, for the time being, different persons.

Total economic production in the United States had doubled;* wages rose by 70 percent.

By separating body from mind and spirit, Descartes was denying the dependence of the material world on God's will and His providence. "A God without dominion, providence, and final causes," Newton later wrote, "is nothing else but Fate.

It put the interest of the producers and merchants ahead of that of consumers, who only want low prices and a ready supply of goods. Merchants often prefer the opposite.

The intellectual tyranny that Newton had seen in the darkest chapters in the history of the medieval Church, he saw repeated in the tyranny of a godless, soulless science. He intended to correct that view and free men's minds for the future.

while Judaism and the Bible gave Christianity its weight and matter, its flesh and blood, Plato and Neoplatonism became its conceptual spine.

The Nietzschean nihilist could "implant into that which is degenerate and desires to die a longing for the end"—in other words, by planting the idea of decline in society one could actually hasten its demise.11

Man's reason was set free, but he used that freedom to try to dominate everything that now seemed separate from himself and human reason, the so-called Other. Science, law, government, even language itself—all became instruments by which Western man reduced diversity to sameness, spontaneity to uniformity, and difference (defined as the Other) to multiform objects for control, like butterflies in a killing-jar.

At dawn on May 25, 1453, the bells of Constantinople's churches rang out an urgent appeal.