Quotes from Human Accomplishment

By Charles Murray (2003)

• So closely is giving birth linked to the fundamental human goal of giving meaning to one’s life that it has been argued that, ultimately, it is not so much that motherhood keeps women from doing great things outside the home as it is men’s inability to give birth that forces them to look for substitutes.#
• By and large, it has not been Asian or Arabic scholars, fighting for recognition against European indifference, who are responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-European cultures, but Europeans themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the by-products of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and later American scholars, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, who set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected.#
  History
• Even more startling are the words of Plutarch about Phidias, whose artistic works were regarded by the ancients with the awe that we accord Michelangelo’s: “No gifted young man upon seeing the Zeus of Phidias at Olympia ever wanted to be Phidias. For it does not necessarily follow that, if a work is delightful because of its gracefulness, the man who made it is worthy of our serious regard.” That the Romans could so reverently admire a work of art and so scorn the person who created it is perhaps part of the reason that the Romans left us so little of their own creation in the arts and sciences.#
  ArtHistory