We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.

As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

The experience of the past lives little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient.

Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.