“Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.”
Tip: press → for another quote, C to copy, S to share.
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.
Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
