Benjamin Griffin

“The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte — a keyboard instrument to play "soft and loud." Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply "a soft.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“[...] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“And I, too, am the same… only there is no love in my heart, or desire for love, no interest in work, not contentment in myself. And how remote and impossible my old religious enthusiasms seem now… and my former abounding life! What once seemed so plain and right – that happiness lay in living for others – is unintelligible now. Why live for others, when life has not attractions even for oneself?”
― Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness and Other Stories