There Are Inquiries Which Are A Sort

No Convention Gets To Be A Convention At All Except By Grace Of A Lot Of Clever And Powerful People First Inventing It, And Then Imposing It On Others. You Can Be Pretty Sure, If You Are Strictly Conventional, That You Are Following Genius--a Long Way Off. And Unless You Are A Genius Yourself, That Is A Good Thing To Do.

... If We Have A Dollar To Spend On Some Wild Excess, We Shall Spend It On A Book, Not On Asparagus Out Of Season.

... The More We Recruit From Immigrants Who Bring No Personal Traditions With Them, The More America Is Going To Ignore The Things Of The Spirit. No One Whose Consuming Desire Is Either For Food Or For Motor-cars Is Going To Care About Culture, Or Even Know What It Is.

... There Are Some Who, Believing That All Is For The Best In The Best Of Possible Worlds, And That To-morrow Is Necessarily Better Than To-day, May Think That If Culture Is A Good Thing We Shall Infallibly Be Found To Have More Of It That We Had A Generation Since; And That If We Can Be Shown Not To Have More Of It, It Can Be Shown Not To Be Worth Seeking.

There Are Inquiries Which Are A Sort Of Moral Burglary.