"An Intimate History of Humanity"

[fiefoe]

<More quotes:>

• Avarice, pride, envy and greed, rather than friendliness and kindness, are the necessary bases of a successful economy, said Bernard Mandeville.
• The Koran said, 'Merchants are the messengers of this world and God's trustees on earth.'
• Moses Maimonides: I seek no victory for the honour of my soul.
  
• General Robert E. Lee confessed, 'It is good that war is so terrible or else we would love it too much'.
• It need not be harmful to discover, at the beginning of one's career, without waiting for disappointment, that one is, as Burton said of himself, 'a waif and stray'.
  

<On family:>
__ The Chinese were responsible for the world's first great revolution of the emotions, when they transferred supremacy to living fathers. Chinese fathers fought a battle against fear of the dead, and won.
__ Family's final about-turn has been to transform itself from an employment organisation into one concerned primarily with leisure.

<From the personal stories:>

• Her path to independence has been simple: she puts the blame for misadventures on herself; and she finds that a relaxing sensation, because it means there is hope - it is only herself to change.
• 'As soon as one recognises that one is not a genius, one must organise oneself.'
• So much knowledge has been fed into them that there is very little they can admire with enthusiasm.
• ... the model of the literary intellectual, for whom thinking means above all being critical, in the sense of being more forcibly affected by what is wrong than by what is right, having one eye more powerful than the other.

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