Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for 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 the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.

Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.