Hitherto Man Had To Live

All "if" Statements About The Past Are As Dubious As Prophecies Of The Future Are. It Seems Fairly Plausible That If Alexander Or Ghengis Khan Had Never Been Born, Some Other Individual Would Have Filled His Place And Executed The Design Of The Hellenic Or Mongolic Expansion; But The Alexanders Of Philosophy And Religion, Of Science And Art, Seem Less Expendable; Their Impact Seems Less Determined By Economic Challenges And Social Pressures; And They Seem To Have A Much Wider Range Of Possibilities To Influence The Direction, Shape And Texture Of Civilizations.

Of All Forms Of Mental Activity, The Most Difficult To Induce Even In The Minds Of The Young, Who May Be Presumed Not To Have Lost Their Flexibility, Is The Art Of Handling The Same Bundle Of Data As Before, But Placing Them In A New System Of Relations With One Another By Giving Them A Different Framework, All Of Which Virtually Means Putting On A Different Kind Of Thinking-cap For The Moment. It Is Easy To Teach Anybody A New Fact...but It Needs Light From Heaven Above To Enable A Teacher To Break The Old Framework In Which The Student Is Accustomed To Seeing.

The Cell Door Slammed Behind Rubishov.

Modern Man Lives Isolated In His Artificial Environment, Not Because The Artificial Is Evil As Such, But Because Of His Lack Of Comprehension Of The Forces Which Make It Work- Of The Principles Which Relate His Gadgets To The Forces Of Nature, To The Universal Order. It Is Not Central Heating Which Makes His Existence 'unnatural,' But His Refusal To Take An Interest In The Principles Behind It. By Being Entirely Dependent On Science, Yet Closing His Mind To It, He Leads The Life Of An Urban Barbarian.

A Writer's Ambition Should Be To Trade A Hundred Contemporary Readers For Ten Readers In Ten Years' Time And For One Reader In A Hundred Years' Time.