. . . a barbarian was a man content to believe without reason and to live without liberty. In the end the two conceptions of life - the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West - would fight for the body and soul of Greece. Rationalism would win under Pericles, as under Caesar, Leo X, and Frederick, but mysicism would always return. The alternate victories of these complementary philosophies in the vast pendulum of history constitute the essential biography of Western civilization.

Lycurgus . . . wished children to learn his laws not by writing but by oral transmission and youthful practice under careful guidance and example; it was safer, he thought, to make men good by unconscious habituation than to rely upon theoretical persuasion . . . Only choral dance and music remained, for there Spartan discipline could shine, and the individual could be lost in the mass.

The past would be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.

[Orthagoras] appealed to the racial pride of the dispossessed, led them in a successful revolution, made himself dictator, and established the manufacturing and trading classes in power.

The growth of wealth and luxury made epicureanism fashionable, while stoicism and patriotism seemed antiquated and absurd; . . . Science and philosophy, in the history of states, reach their height after decadence has set in; wisdom is a harbinger of death.