“Who can say that there is any keener intellect now than that which made the civilization at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, with its transportation, banking, commerce, and public laws five thousand years ago, or raised the pyramids, or wrote the Iliad, or wrought the wondrous forms of beauty in art and literature that have come down from ancient times? So near as we can read it, the history of the world has been alternate light and shadow, in which dark ages have followed golden ages. There have been eras which shine forth with great brilliancy through multitudinous records, and other eras notorious by the absence of recorded achievements. The old saying that there are but three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves, has had its counterpart in the history of nations. A people gather, grow strong under adversity, weaken under prosperity, and fall, first victims of weakness within and then victims of strength without. No one can deny this. Nor need it unduly alarm us. The American theory of society is founded in part on this condition…We need not feel that therefore there has been and will be no progress…The increase of knowledge, the development of science, have only given society new weapons with which it is possible for civilization to commit suicide. So far as we can see that happened time and again in the ancient world…Lands under the oppression of despotism crumbled, even if their allies won. Lands under the inspiration of freedom remained firm, enduring to the end. Neither shall we know by how wide a margin the cause of that civilization we represent, under the most tremendous shock that ever shook the world, yet survived. The great fact is that so far it has survived. It is ours to say whether it shall survive.” (‘The Power of the Moral Law’ by Calvin Coolidge, addressing the Community-Chest Dinner, Springfield, Massachusetts, October 11, 1921)
The Importance of the Obvious 