… is from pages 67-68 of Will Durant’s 1953 volume, The Renaissance:
But it took more than a revival of antiquity to make the Renaissance. And first of all it took money – smelly bourgeois money…. Money is the root of all civilization. The funds of merchants, bankers, and the Church paid for the manuscripts that revived antiquity. Nor was it those manuscripts which freed the mind and senses of the Renaissance; it was the secularism that came from the rise of the middle class; it was the growth of the universities, of knowledge and philosophy, the realistic sharpening of minds by the study of law, the broadening of minds by wider acquaintance with the world.
