A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.

It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it.

Our political organization, based as it is on an eighteenth-century separation of powers and on a nineteenth-century nationalist state, is generally recognized to be semiobselete.

It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence.