The Lessons of History

If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in pr

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embe

We may not have excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the level and average of knowledge beyond any age in history.

omnis moritur.

non omnis moritur.

Our problem is whether the average man has increased his ability to control the conditions of his life.

We shall here define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life.

Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable;

Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?