Status Updates From The Lessons of History

History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large

97

A concise book

A balanced first section has me interested. Examples of fanatics and their theories of race superiority are handled with excellent finesse.

“When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic, limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.”

Reminds me a lot of the current state of my country. It feels like politicians have shifted towards not the betterment of the United States, but rather trying to recreate the ethos of the 1950s.

“Should North America, now at the height of its power, accept such a future as inevitable, withdraw within its frontiers, and let itself be encircled”

Isolationism, the greatest lie ever told.
This highlights the main point of the book: history echoes.

لا تُبنى المجتمعات على الفضائل والمُثل العليا، ولكن تُبنى على طِباع البشر، ودستور الولايات والدول يُعيد كتابته دستور الإنسان.

It is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however, lonely, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.

(In relation to diversity on earth)

There is no humorist like History
(In reference to birth rate demographics shifting culture)

Sometimes wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of 100 species flying leaping, creeping, crawling borrowing things. The startled animals, curry away at are coming the bird scatter the fish disperse in the Brook. Suddenly we perceived to what a perilous minority

“ man, not the Earth, makes civilization”

This chapter on geography’s impact on history (specifically how air travel made water travel obsolete) got me thinking about my own country (USA).

The Egyptians and Sumerians would be shocked at Denver’s size, and underwhelmed by St. Louis today.

Also fun fact, people thought St. Louis would surpass New York based on its geography in the 1800s.

“Geography is the matrix of history, it’s nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases and oceans draw settlers to their shores for water is the life of organisms and towns and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade.”

“We must not demand of progress that it should be continuous or universal.”

“Have we given ourselves more freedom than our intelligence can digest? Or are we nearing such moral and social disorder that frightened parents will run back to Mother Church and beg her to discipline their children.”

“One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioned century is that science is neutral; it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily then it can build.”

“Shall we suppose/that each civilization is an organism, naturally and yet mysteriously endowed with the power of development and the fatality of death.”

“Perhaps we are now restlessly moving toward that higher plateau of competition; we may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we have this earth be one.”

“Let us refuse, at whatever cost to ourselves, to make a hundred Hiroshimas in China.”

“(Says the general) the Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.”

“In the military interpretation of history war is the final arbiter, and is accepted as natural and necessary by all but the cowards and simpletons.”

“War is one of the constants of history./“polemics pater panton”: war or competition, is the father of all things.”
“The state has our instincts without our restraints.”

“If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it had created, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all—and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.”

“Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forget to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.”

“…Death raged in every shape, and, as usually happens at such times, there is no length to which violence did not go.”

“To break sharply with the past is to court the madness that may follow the shock of sudden blows or mutilations.”

“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.”

“Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.”

“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”

“In one way the Christianity lent a hand against itself by developing in many Christian a moral sense that could no longer stomach the vengeful God of traditional theology.”

“Then the higher criticism of the Bible, displaying the marvellous library as the imperfect work of fallible men.”