Grace’s Reviews > The Lessons of History > Status Update

“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.”