Robert Briffault Quotes

For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the permanent distinctive force of the modern world, and the supreme source of its victory, natural science and the scientific spirit.

Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.

The Renaissance of Europe did not take place in the 15th century. Rather it began when Europe learned from the culture of the Arabs. The cradle of European awakening is not Italy. It is the Muslim Spain.

The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.

Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical.... It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap, and demagogy.... Yet democracy is the only form of social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice.

For a male and female to live continuously together is biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.

The effects of infantile instruction are, like those of syphilis, never completely cured.

No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the face of man's evolution.

The old fellow who was cadging drinks from me the other night at the Cafe Royal told me he had known Julian Bern's people in the old days at Rome.

The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.

In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that _men_ know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is _look_ at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home.

The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.

The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment... when he is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.