The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.
Tyranny is increasingly unsustainable in this post-cold-war era. It is doomed to failure. But it must be prodded to exit the stage with a whimper - not the bang that extremists long for.
There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.
We have the universe to roam in in imagination. It is our virtue to be infinitely varied. The worst tyranny is uniformity.
The new century has brought on its own terrible dangers, which although not reaching the apocalyptic potential of the Cold War, still have the capacity to shake our world.
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.
If we don't change from a world society that worships money and power to one that worships compassion and generosity, I think we'll be extinct by mid-century. I don't say that as an alarmist or as a pessimist.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for life is never so low or so little as when occupied with the present.