In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.

How strange it is that murder has the sanction of law in one and only one of the human relationships, and that is the most important of all, that of nation to nation.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

Personality has power to uplift, power to depress, power to curse, and power to bless.

If there is anything worse than international warfare, is civil warfare, and the United States was destined to experience it in the extreme of bitterness.

Many obstacles to the expansion of good will have presented themselves.

The less one knows, the more he thinks he knows, and the more willing he is to employ any and all measures to enforce his views upon others.

It did not come naturally; in fact, it would be difficult to conceive of any more dogmatic and less tolerant people than the first settlers on New England shores.

Ideas have unhinged the gates of empires.

It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice.

Permanent superiority has never been realized by any nation in history. After the rise comes the fall.

Singing is not indulged in by Rotary clubs of some countries and all clubs are given full privilege to do as they please about including it in their programs.

The lawlessness of frontier life in America has been pictured as a remarkable phenomenon. In reality, it was the natural consequence of indiscriminate mixing of volatile substances.

One's nativity is not of his own choosing, but whatever it may be, it is entitled to respect; and all nations have honorable place in the world's family.

Individuals and nations owe it to themselves and the world to become informed.

Descendants of New England pioneers are proud of their ancestry and glad to proclaim the fact that so far as the United States are concerned, New England is in deed the cradle of religious liberty.

It has been the way of Rotary to focus thought upon matters in which members are in agreement, rather than upon matters in which they are in disagreement.

One's religion is one's own possession and he has a right to it.

Segregation never brought anyone anything except trouble.

If there ever was a militant religion, it was that of early New England.

While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.

In the clashes between ignorance and intelligence, ignorance is generally the aggressor.

The very strength of a nation eventually proves to be its weakness.

But primitive man had enemies real as well as imaginary, and they were not subject to priestly sorceries.

Ignorance is a menace to peace.

When an individual, a sect, a clique or a nation hates and despises another individual, sect, clique or nation, he or they simply do not know the objects of their hatred. Ignorance is at the bottom of it.

In the cold, shivering twilight, preceding the daybreak of civilization, the dominating emotion of man was fear.

In course of time, religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits, and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears.

The nation that is supreme above all others during one age, will be eclipsed by another in the next age.

The higher the general average of intelligence, all things else being equal, the less the disposition to be meddlesome, critical, and overbearing.

Much responsibility rests upon the shoulders of the song leader; it is not infrequently within his power to make or break a meeting.

There is nothing in the genius of America more precious today than the spirit of religious and political tolerance in its application to our own people.

To attempt to superimpose its views through the exercise of force, is seldom the part of intelligence; it is frequently the part of ignorance.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.

The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.