Laith Schroeder > Recent Status Updates

“When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic, limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change.”

Reminds me a lot of the current state of my country. It feels like politicians have shifted towards not the betterment of the United States, but rather trying to recreate the ethos of the 1950s.

“Should North America, now at the height of its power, accept such a future as inevitable, withdraw within its frontiers, and let itself be encircled”

Isolationism, the greatest lie ever told.
This highlights the main point of the book: history echoes.

It is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however, lonely, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.

(In relation to diversity on earth)

There is no humorist like History
(In reference to birth rate demographics shifting culture)

Sometimes wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of 100 species flying leaping, creeping, crawling borrowing things. The startled animals, curry away at are coming the bird scatter the fish disperse in the Brook. Suddenly we perceived to what a perilous minority

“ man, not the Earth, makes civilization”

This chapter on geography’s impact on history (specifically how air travel made water travel obsolete) got me thinking about my own country (USA).

The Egyptians and Sumerians would be shocked at Denver’s size, and underwhelmed by St. Louis today.

Also fun fact, people thought St. Louis would surpass New York based on its geography in the 1800s.

“Geography is the matrix of history, it’s nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases and oceans draw settlers to their shores for water is the life of organisms and towns and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade.”