What a great quote!:

“Our age’s good fortune. — There are two respects in which our age may be called fortunate. With respect to the past we have enjoyment of all the cultures there have ever been and of their productions, and nourish ourselves with the noblest blood of every age; we still stand sufficiently close to the magical forces of the power out of whose womb they were born to be able to subject ourselves to them in passing with joy and awe: whereas earlier cultures were capable of enjoying only themselves, with no view of what lay outside — it was as though they lay beneath a vaulted dome, of greater or less extent, which, though light streamed down upon them from it, was itself impenetrable to their gaze. In respect to the future there opens out before us, for the first time in history, the tremendous far-flung prospect of human-ecumenical goals embracing the entire inhabited earth. At the same time we feel conscious of possessing the strength to be allowed without presumption to take this new task in hand ourselves without requiring supernatural assistance; indeed, let our undertaking eventuate as it may, even if we have overestimated our strength, there is in any case no one to whom we owe a reckoning except ourselves: henceforth mankind can do with itself whatever it wishes.”

You can’t lose with a quote like this. Whether or not it is factually true, it is morally true: it reveals a hope worth cultivating: a pluralist interpretation of e pluribus unum.

He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit…