"This system had grown more rigid and complex since the Vedic period; not only because it is in the nature of institutions to become stiff with age, but because the instability of the political order, and the overrunning of India by alien peoples and creeds, had intensified caste as a barrier to the mixture of Moslem and Hindu blood. ...It (the caste system) offered an escape from the plutocracy or the military dictatorship which are apparently the only alternatives to aristocracy; it gave to a country shorn of political stability by a hundred invasions and revolutions a social, moral and cultural order and continuity rivaled only by the Chinese. Amid a hundred anarchic changes in the state, the Brahmans maintained, through the system of caste, a stable society, and preserved, augmented and transmitted civilization. The nation bore with them patiently, even proudly, because every one knew that in the end they were the one indispensable government of India."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Story of Civilization
288 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Story of Civilization →
Related Quotes
"The Argives ascribed the foundation of their city to Pelasgic Argus, the hero with a hundred eyes; and its first flou…"
"Apparently the legislators felt that to alter certain customs, or to establish new ones, the safest procedure would b…"
"When an advanced thinker asked Lycurgus to establish a democracy Lycurgus replied, “Begin, my friend, by setting it u…"
"He [Solon] laid it down that those who remained neutral in seditions should lose their citizenship, for he felt that …"
"I wish to tell as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the contributions that genius and labor have made to…"
"Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imi…"
"If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes …"
""For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, …"
"The civilization of Babylonia was not as fruitful for humanity as Egypt’s, not as varied and profound as India’s, not…"
"He [Solon] made it a crime to speak evil of the dead, or to speak evil of the living in temples, courts, or public of…"