Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.Read
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
Interpretation
Science and technology change our lives, but our understanding is shaped by memory, tradition, and myth.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. highlights the duality of human experience in relation to advancements. While science and technology bring about significant transformations in how we live, it is our memories, beliefs, and traditions that influence how we respond to these changes. This underscores the importance of cultural context and historical understanding in interpreting modern innovations.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of technology on society, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of cultural heritage.
Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.
The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.
In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.
An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, 'with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'
Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost wholly in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word "Explosion" alone, of which the ancients knew nothing.
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago
We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers, and if the whole of the rest of living nature proclaims with one accord from all sides the evolution of the world of organisms, we cannot assume that the process stopped short of Man. But it follows also that the factors which brought about the development of Man from his Simian ancestry must be the same as those which have brought about the whole of evolution.
It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.