"My own “take” on my career is that I was driven to, or striving for, the job of witness to an age of technological change. The main intellectual quest was to grasp history, in the sense of people as different as C.P. Snow and Fernand Braudel and Garrett Mattingly of The Armada, the stumbling and contingent story of how we got where we are. The motto is, “We are fated to survive.” The smart aleck formulation could be: “Nothing so interesting as Armageddon will happen.” My 2017 essay in the 60th anniversary book of my class of 1957 (pages 683-692) at Harvard is entitled, “So We Decided Not to Blow Ourselves Up.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
29 December 2019, as quoted by David Brown in the comments section of:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Victor_McElheny
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Victor McElheny
Victor King McElheny (September 8, 1935 – July 14, 2025) was an American science writer, journalist, and biographer.
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Victor McElheny →
Related Quotes
"The performance record for interdisciplinary gatherings of superstars addressing themselves to world problems is not …"
"Watson could so easily have been brushed aside as a crazy kid and an arrogant pest, whose great discovery was a fluke…"
"The march of genomics is taking place alongside a background of ethical and spiritual anxieties. Would the informatio…"
"He was a horse of goodly countenance, rather expressive of vigilance than fire; though an unnatural appearance of fie…"
"In the younger days of the Republic there lived in the county of —— two men, who were admitted on all hands to be the…"
"It is said that a hundred gamecocks will live in perfect harmony together it you do not put a hen with them; and so i…"
"All the knowing ones were consulted as to the issue, and they all agreed, to a man, in one of two opinions: either th…"
"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fi…"
"Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable."
"I think style chooses you... if I could choose, I would write like Jane Austen and I would draw like Rembrandt."