How fair a flower is sown
When Knowledge goes, with fearful tread,
To the dark bed
Of the divine Unknown!
“I’m filled with the sadness that afflicted the Roman patricians of the fourth century: I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth. …I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.”
Gustave Flaubert | in a letter to Ivan Turgenev