Excellence Means When A Man Or Woman

To Be Surprised, To Wonder, Is To Begin To Understand. This Is The Sport, The Luxury, Special To The Intellectual Man.

Why Write If This Too Easy Activity Of Pushing A Pen Across Paper Is Not Given A Certain Bullfighting Risk And We Do Not Approach Dangerous, Agile And Two-horned Topics?

[i]t Is Necessary To Insist Upon This Extraordinary But Undeniable Fact: Experimental Science Has Progressed Thanks In Great Part To The Work Of Men Astoundingly Mediocre, And Even Less Than Mediocre. That Is To Say, Modern Science, The Root And Symbol Of Our Actual Civilization, Finds A Place For The Intellectually Commonplace Man And Allows Him To Work Therein With Success.

The Assurance That We Have No Means Of Answering [final] Questions Is No Valid Excuse For Callousness Towards Them. The More Deeply Should We Feel, Down To The Roots Of Our Being, Their Pressure And Their Sting. Whose Hunger Has Ever Been [sated] With The Knowledge That He Could Not Eat?

[t]he Mass-man Sees In The State An Anonymous Power, And Feeling Himself, Like It, Anonymous, He Believes That The State Is Something Of His Own. Suppose That In The Public Life Of A Country Some Difficulty, Conflict, Or Problem Presents Itself, The Mass-man Will Tend To Demand That The State Intervene Immediately And Undertake A Solution Directly With Its Immense And Unassailable Resources. This Is The Gravest Danger That To-day Threatens Civilisation: State Intervention; The Absorption Of All Spontaneous Social Effort By The State.