Apropos of everything or nothing, depending on your inclination.
I admire Olaf Stapledon’s vision of humanity in Last and First Men (1930): relentlessly self-destructive but irrepressibly resilient, brimming with potential but fundamentally and permanently limited. In this vision, humanity maintains a precarious existence and is usually too individualistic and preoccupied to realize just how fragile it is.
He repeats the sentiment more succinctly in the opening chapter of Starmaker (1937):
From this high look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
Unhelpfully trite though it might be, a particularly notable line about the better angels of our nature comes to mind.
Noodlings 