More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.
The greatest fortune of a people would be to keep ignorant persons from public office, and secure their wisest men to rule them.
Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.
Our problem is whether the total and average level of human ability has increased, and stands at its peak today.
When we take a total view, and compare our modern existence, precarious and chaotic as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, brutality, cannibalism, and diseases of primitive peoples, we are a little comforted: the lowest strata of our race may still differ only slightly from such men, but above those strata thousands and millions have reached to mental and moral heights inconceivable, presumably, to the early mind.
As to happiness, no man can say; it is an elusive angel, destroyed by detection and seldom amenable to measurement. Presumably it depends first upon health, secondly upon love, and thirdly upon wealth.
Above all, consider it, in its fullest definition, as the technique of transmitting as completely as possible, to as many as possible, that technological, intellectual, moral, and artistic heritage through which the race forms the growing individual and makes him human.
