A society, we may say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve for itself as best it may. … - Arnold J. Toynbee

The sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolated darkness. The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it brought consumed countless man. But mankind itself did not yield. With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered. Until the first rays of a new dawn at long last penetrated the horizon.

The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.

The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults...