Status Updates From The Ideal of Culture: Essays

On the "Encyclopaedia Britannica-Eleventh Edition"

"People certified with degrees from what the world considers the best universities and colleges sometimes forget that we are all autodidacts, on our own in the endless attempt to patch over the extraordinary gaps in out knowledge."

From "Edward Gibbon":

"Through twenty years of labor, this chubby little man also proved that the first, if not the sole, criterion for a great historian is to be a great writer."

Why I prefer the older, classic historians to the bulk of today's professional historians.

From "Old Age and Other Laughs"

"Virtue consists of ordering a salad for lunch; disappointment, in eating it."

"Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples."

" If you think you are a genius, you probably aren't."

"Out of cowardice, fewer and fewer intellectuals and academics are prepared to go against the grain of their times."

After 45 years in American higher education, I can attest to the truth of the latter.

Very good read. Insightful.