If many things in the past have gone wrong in the lives of men and in the lives of their communities, it is because both small- and large-scale activities were blundered into without any thought or vision of universal planning.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.
To a person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.
Great changes cannot take place in the minds of generations of men without a corresponding change in their external symbols. There must be a harmony between the inner and the outward condition of human beings, and the progress of the one must keep pace with the progress of the other.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.
If you look at the history of big obstacles in understanding our world, there's usually an intuitive assumption underlying them that's wrong.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.