Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest Quotes

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The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

It was an idea that made the crucial difference between British and Iberian America – an idea about the way people should govern themselves. Some people make the mistake of calling that idea ‘democracy’ and imagining that any country can adopt ...

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, le...

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they to...

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

Not the last time in Western history, the revolutionaries armed themselves with a new religion to steel themselves for greater outrageous.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium exper...

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest

Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone is really inventors applied to register 9591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was 50 and for all...

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest