...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
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It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper read more
It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.
Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the read more
Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is read more
To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will read more
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death...
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which read more
Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.
There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.
There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that read more
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling read more
Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.
...it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in read more
...it is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
