My top 10 highlights from the book:

1.  In the end superior ability has its way.

2.  History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

3.  Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability.

4.  All technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends.

5.  The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows.

6.  Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

7.  We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village.

8.  In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt.

9.  No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

10.  Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.

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