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“Insanity runs its own peculiar way. Coon hunting is a very strong symptom. In a way it reminds me of what life’s like. You work and you fall down and you eat and you fight, and when it’s all over you feel awful foolish. Because, generally, you ain’t even got a coon to show for all the commotion.”

“This didn’t happen every day, or even every year, but once in a while it happened like that, and I mean to say that the walk up to where the dogs were painted against the side of a hill was the longest, happiest journey I ever took in my life.”

“There’s more ways to kill a cat than to choke it to death on butter” p. 159

“There are all kinds of good reasons for the prevalent spottiness of history.”

“Knowledge of that kind takes so long to come by, solidly at least, and there is so much of it to try to have before you die, if you care anything about it, that to lose any small part of what you do have seems unfair.”

“Some days load themselves with questions whose answers have died, and maybe never mattered hugely.”

“Helping folks when they need it is fine and is highly spoke of in the Good Book, but if it ain’t done in such a way that they can hold their heads up afterwards it’s best not done at all.”

“I can’t say any of the girls there actually gasped with admiration, but three or four sure looked like they wanted to.”

“The success of your endeavors is not yours to judge.”

“What is good for you is better than what you want.” p.38

The ideas are fascinating, though the impact of geography on cultural diffusion is probably much less significant than at the time of writing and the internet - and other technologies - may have blurred the sharp distinction between material of a culture and non-material aspects of the same culture.

The progressions are excellent, but the textual descriptions of each move need some editing to accurately describe each progression.

Far too many poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

“As education spreads, theologies lose credence, and receive an external conformity without influence upon conduct or hope.”

“For freedom and equality are sworn and natural enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”

“Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life - peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.”