Time & Perspective Quote by George William Curtis

Progress is supposed to be the American religion, but Curtis drops a quiet heresy: bloodlines don’t automatically get better just because the calendar moves forward. The line has the cool, reform-minded bite of a 19th-century moralist who’s watched “good family” rhetoric used as social armor. Curtis isn’t attacking kinship so much as the superstition that pedigree functions like compound interest.

The specific intent is corrective. In an era obsessed with lineage, respectability, and inherited standing, he’s puncturing the fantasy that time refines a family the way it refines institutions or technology. Families, unlike nations, don’t have built-in mechanisms for self-reform; they repeat. They calcify. They preserve their advantages and their defects with equal efficiency. Curtis’s phrasing matters: “observed in history” appeals to evidence, not sentiment. It’s a journalist’s move against a romantic one, implying that anyone claiming generational “improvement” is selling a story, not reporting a fact.

The subtext is a warning about entitlement. If families don’t improve with time, then inherited prestige is at best cosmetic and at worst a cover for stagnation. The remark also nudges responsibility back onto the living: whatever “better” looks like won’t arrive by tradition alone; it has to be chosen, argued for, and practiced.

Read in context, the line slots neatly into a post-Civil War America grappling with class formation, old elites, and new money. Curtis, a reformist voice in that landscape, is reminding readers that history is littered with venerable surnames that went nowhere - and with ordinary people who did.