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“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.”

“Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad.”

“When while preaching peace the Church fomented religious wars in sixteenth-century France and the Thirty Years’ War in seventeenth-century Germany.”

“Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.”

“It is pleasant to be relieved of theological terrors.”

“Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions.”
“Insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory.”

“The South creates the civilization, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.”

“History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization under almost any skin.”

“If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.”

“War is a nations way of eating”

“Man, not the earth, makes civilization”

“Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home.”

“History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque”