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History is a fragment of biology:
If some of us seem to escape the strife or the trials it is because our group protects us; but that group itself must meet the tests of survival.
life is competition.
life is selection.
when one prevails the other dies.
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.
life must breed.
Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly.
She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high;
If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.
There is a limit to the fertility of the soil; every advance in agricultural technology is sooner or later canceled by the excess of births over deaths;
There is no humorist like history.
History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from
them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Attempts to relate civilization to race by measuring the relation of brain to face or weight have she...
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It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.
Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological:
A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse-tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.
Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace.
It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.
Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age.
“it was fear that first made the gods”
One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection.
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”
“the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”
The Roman Senate, so famous for its wisdom, adopted an uncompromising course when the concentration of wealth approached an explosive point in Italy; the result was a hundred years of class and civil war.
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
if war continues to absorb and dominate it, or if the itch to rule the world requires a large military establishment and appropriation, the freedoms of democracy may one by one succumb to the discipline of arms and strife.
War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.
Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
“You have forgotten all the lessons of history,” he says, “and all that nature of man which you described. Some conflicts are too fundamental to be resolved by negotiation; and during the prolonged negotiations (if history may be our guide) subversion would go on. A world order will come not by a gentlemen’s agreement, but through so decisive a victory by one of the great powers that it will be able to dictate and enforce international law, as Rome did from Augustus to Aurelius.
History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large.
We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village.
