William H. McNeill quotes - page 2
The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of private life... Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. ...But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises in life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India.
William H. McNeill
In 1933-34, I took a full-blown college course on the University of Chicago campus. This was part of an experiment by President Hutchins to see whether combining the last two years of high school with the first two years of college might make a more rigorous curriculum possible for what he called "General Education." This he hoped might provide a rational, philosophical guide to adult life and citizenship, replacing the vanished religious certainties he had grown up to reject-and regret.
William H. McNeill
My principles require me merely to invite you to agree, while expecting the contrary. Missionaries do not make converts with such a message: millions are not mobilized by such tepid phrases. That is why the merely intellectual compulsion to regard human diversity and flux is unlikely to prevail against simpler systems of misunderstanding truly capable of altering the world in which we live.
William H. McNeill
New diseases like syphilis seemed to call for new and "stronger" medicines; and this became one of the stock arguments for resort to the Paracelsian chemical pharmacopeia and mystical medical philosophy. With every fundamental of medicine thus called into question, the only logical recourse was to observe results of cures administered in accordance with the old Galenic as against the new Paracelsian theories, and then to choose whichever worked better. The swift development of European medical practice to levels of skill exceeding all other civilized traditions resulted.
William H. McNeill
Inferences and large dosages of imagination actually have allowed the construction of a far more adequate understanding of the cosmic and human past than earlier generations achieved. I believe that this is the central intellectual accomplishment of the twentieth century. Innumerable cosmologists, physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, ecologists, ethologists, and other specialists have played their part; a few swashbuckling intellects led the way, and the outlines of an evolutionary worldview, uniting natural and human history, has begun to emerge. It may be convincing for generations to come-or again may not.
William H. McNeill
When terms... evolve and change definition with time; and when the social reality which terms are intended to organize and render intelligible is also seen to be in flux, capturing the truth in a net of words becomes a matter of intuition and style more than of any scientific method that can be replicated by others and made to achieve the same result every time someone asks the same question, or undertakes the same operations.
William H. McNeill
The single most important stimulus to my thought came by chance when I took a course from Robert Redfield entitled "Folk Society." ...His approach was to set up antithetical ideal types, expecting to locate any actual human community somewhere along the spectrum of opposites his fieldwork had suggested to him.... But in 1936 his typology had no time dimension. I was so strongly attracted to his scheme that it is scarcely an exaggeration to describe my subsequent intellectual effort as an attempt to explore the missing time dimension of social change as Redfield envisaged it, not in Yucatan but around the whole earth and across recorded time.
William H. McNeill
Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.
William H. McNeill
Christian theology was a revised version of Greek philosophy and the effort Plato and his heirs made to discern the permanent behind the sensible, the Ideal and the Real behind the world of individual things - ever in flux, becoming and decaying and never, ever reliably and completely True.
William H. McNeill
The laws of nature, as analyzed mathematically and descriptively by Ptolemy and Galen, bore an interesting, and perhaps not entirely accidental similarity to the law of nations and of nature, as discerned by a long succession of Roman jurists. ...The concept of an objective law applicable to human affairs, yet operating in accord with Nature and Reason and apart both from divine revelation and from human whim or passion, was peculiar to Rome and societies descended from Rome.
William H. McNeill
There is a deep irony in the fact that the more nearly an ideal is brought to realization, the more acutely do the saints and heroes who have committed themselves to the task, experience a vehement sense of failure in not having perfected their ideal in its totality; and inversely, the more perfunctory is the pursuit of an ideal, the less are people troubled by discrepancies between practice and principle.
William H. McNeill