We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

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

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.

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.

Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.