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.
When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.
Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
No approximately correct history of civilization can ever be written which does not throw out in bold relief, as one of the great landmarks of political and social progress, the organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau.
For more about the Bureau. See {629186} and {629187}.
We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.
Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.