I discovered this quote quite a while ago, and then recently rediscovered it lurking within my "Cool Quotes" file. It basically sums up my feelings about history and modernism:
"Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness."
--Albert Einstein, 1954
Travelling and plundering the Internet in search of knowledge. Or something like that.
2 comments:
Hmm. Yes, Mr. Onestone had a point... Of course, he was being a little snobby making it. But I suppose that couldn't be helped. He did have a point.
I'm thinking that people who sought God had a lot to do with the world coming out of the darkness of the Middle Ages, too.
What do you say?
Love,
YM
Onestone? Ahhh, Onestone, I get it. :)
I haven't really read a lot about the end of the Middle Ages, but I know that the Biblical laws of cleanliness were vital in bringing an end to the Black Death, which ravaged Europe during that time.
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