The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

When his apprenticeship was finished (the candidate for Knighthood) was received into the Knightly Order by a ritual of sacramental awe.

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.