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.
In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.
I must confess it was very unexpected and I am very startled at my metamorphosis into a chemist.
You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.
Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.
(On the energy radiated by the Sun) It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.
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