It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.
From Albert J. Nock
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
As far as I know, I have no pride of opinion.
The position of modern science, as far as an ignorant man of letters can understand it, seems not a step in advance of that held by Huxley and Romanes in the last century.
Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.
The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives