Time & Perspective Quote by Henry Cabot Lodge

There is a whole imperial worldview packed into Lodge's casual accounting ledger of bruises and trophies. He frames athletic contests not as leisure but as a strategic investment: time spent on games, and even injuries, become “the price” of global dominance. That phrasing matters. “Price” converts broken bones into a kind of patriotic currency, laundering violence into virtue and making sacrifice feel transactional, even inevitable.

The subtext is Social Darwinism with good posture. Lodge was writing from an America newly confident in its overseas ambitions, when Anglo-Saxon identity was routinely treated as both a biological category and a political entitlement. “English-speaking race” isn’t descriptive; it’s a claim to inheritance - a rhetorical annexation that folds the U.S. into Britain’s imperial story and turns language into destiny. Athletic culture, in this telling, is the training ground for empire: discipline, aggression, teamwork, and a tolerance for pain become proof of fitness to rule.

What makes the line work is how it domesticates conquest. Instead of talking about colonies, coercion, or extraction, Lodge talks about playing fields. He shifts the moral focus from the conquered to the conquerors’ self-imposed hardships, inviting readers to admire the supposed character built through sport rather than question the ethics of “world conquerors” at all. It’s propaganda in a blazer: empire justified not by argument, but by a story of wholesome suffering that makes domination look earned.