"My particular line of country has always been generalization of synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I really hate statements, views, prejudices and beliefs that jump at you suddenly out of mid-air. I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible. So far at any rate my temperament is that of a scientific man. And that is why I have spent a few score thousand hours of my particular allotment of vitality in making outlines of history, short histories of the world, general accounts of the science of life, attempts to bring economic, financial and social life into one conspectus and even, still more desperate, struggles to estimate the possible consequences of this or that set of operating causes upon the future of mankind. All these attempts had profound and conspicuous faults and weaknesses; even my friends are apt to mention them with an apologetic smile; presumptuous and preposterous they were, I admit, but I look back upon them, completely unabashed. Somebody had to break the ice. Somebody had to try out such summaries on the general mind. My reply to the superior critic has always been ... "Damn you, do it better." (pp. 3-4)"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/World_Brain
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
World Brain
53 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by World Brain →
Related Quotes
"There has been ... an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-p…"
"We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence co…"
"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made h…"
"This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and …"
"I will introduce a phrase New Encyclopaedism [...] I want to suggest that something -- a new social organ, a new inst…"
"The modern World Encyclopaedia should consist of relations, extracts, quotations, very carefully assembled with the a…"
"This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and …"
"To [the specialist] even more than to the common intelligent man World Encyclopaedia is going to be of value because …"
"I am not saying ...; what I am saying ... is this, that without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in…"
"The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate. …"