Annotation on 2023-10-20T01:49:52.000
the men who can manage men manage the men
Annotation on 2023-10-19T02:13:41.000
“As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”
Annotation on 2023-10-23T02:44:30.000
history we should have to give the palm to monarchy; democracies, by contrast, have been hectic interludes.
Annotation on 2023-10-14T02:12:16.000
Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” and Mesopotamia built successive civilizations “between the rivers” and along their effluent canals.
Annotation on 2023-10-15T01:56:21.000
. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal
Annotation on 2023-10-14T02:07:45.000
It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.
Annotation on 2023-10-15T00:53:36.000
. Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.
Annotation on 2023-10-17T01:32:26.000
Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house not men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex; economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later; children no longer were
Annotation on 2023-10-18T01:40:51.000
indispensable, in every land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious than any natural aid.
Annotation on 2023-10-15T01:51:15.000
remarkable how many American Negroes have risen to high places in the professions, arts, and letters in the last one hundred years despite a thousand social obstacles.
Annotation on 2023-10-20T01:49:56.000
who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”34
Annotation on 2023-10-24T02:09:30.000
violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old.
Annotation on 2023-10-15T01:56:27.000
itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.
Annotation on 2023-10-20T01:54:14.000
The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws.
Annotation on 2023-10-17T01:32:36.000
economic assets; marriage was delayed; premarital continence became more difficult to maintain.
Annotation on 2023-10-18T01:40:47.000
Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly
Annotation on 2023-10-16T03:07:32.000
to make the order and operation of a society, so the imitative majority follows the innovating minority,
Annotation on 2023-10-16T03:09:27.000
he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
Annotation on 2023-10-24T02:01:37.000
Aristocracy withdraws a few men from the exhausting and coarsening strife of economic competition, and trains them from birth, through example, surroundings, and minor office, for the tasks of government; these tasks require a special preparation that no ordinary family or background can provide.
Annotation on 2023-10-20T01:53:23.000
the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men.
Annotation on 2023-10-21T01:30:57.000
and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution.
Annotation on 2023-10-21T01:33:18.000
. He has put the liberal gospel of liberty to his use by arguing that businessmen left relatively free from transportation tolls and legislative regulation can give the public a greater abundance of food, homes, comfort, and leisure than has ever come from industries managed by politicians,
Annotation on 2023-10-16T03:10:28.000
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
Annotation on 2023-10-23T02:43:01.000
Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order;
Annotation on 2023-10-16T03:10:20.000
before being allowed to enter the human race.
Annotation on 2023-10-24T02:09:44.000
enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
Annotation on 2023-10-24T02:09:04.000
The only real revolution is in the
Annotation on 2023-10-16T03:00:03.000
In this analysis human beings are normally equipped by “nature” (here meaning heredity) with six positive and six negative instincts, whose function it is to preserve the individual, the family, the group, or the species.
Annotation on 2023-10-23T02:44:25.000
If we were to judge forms of government from their prevalence and duration in
Annotation on 2023-10-24T02:14:39.000
The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction;…
Annotation on 2023-10-21T01:30:52.000
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable,
Annotation on 2023-10-15T00:45:23.000
man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.
Annotation on 2023-10-20T01:53:26.000
The concentration of wealth is a natural
Annotation on 2023-10-17T01:27:32.000
Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence.
Annotation on 2023-10-16T03:00:45.000
Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.
Annotation on 2023-10-21T01:35:16.000
business chicanery,
Annotation on 2023-10-17T01:26:00.000
, being uncertain when he might eat again; insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory—if only in the blood—of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the ability to kill.
Annotation on 2023-10-15T01:48:11.000
History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.
Annotation on 2023-10-20T01:53:33.000
result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history.
Annotation on 2023-10-14T02:11:31.000
. Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.
Annotation on 2023-10-28T02:43:55.415
In organic periods men are busy building; in critical periods they are busy destroying.69
Annotation on 2023-10-28T02:47:23.733
On one point all are agreed: civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear—or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams.
Annotation on 2023-10-28T02:49:32.035
If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and
Annotation on 2023-10-28T02:49:39.659
energy of will (which is almost a definition of genius), capable of effective responses to new situations (which is almost a definition of intelligence).
Annotation on 2023-10-29T02:16:23.016
Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste.
Annotation on 2023-10-29T02:23:09.533
Since we have admitted no substantial change in man’s nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends
Annotation on 2023-10-29T02:24:32.333
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed mythology and art rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.
Annotation on 2023-10-30T02:08:20.004
and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable;