“I have ample proof, unfortunately, that the teaching of literature in the Sorbonne and the Universities has become pathetic. The abuse of history, of the footnotes of history, has destroyed all critical sense and taste. I know a professor who spent a whole year giving a commentary on Lamartine’s ‘Le Lac.’ He traced the history of a little pink or blue notebook in which Lamartine had scrawled a few stanzas of his poem. He related what hands it passed through, he counted the pages, analyzed them… That required several lectures. When the last one came around, neither he nor his students had read the poem yet. To these so-called historians, it seems that all the artists of the past suffered, wrote, and lived only to provide matter for a few bibliographical index cards. They have confused research with education. We must have researchers. But ‘researchers’ are not professors. Let the researchers do research and the professors teach. They are two distinct functions. No one has more admiration for scholars than I do. And yet I would wish them never to lack a sense of quality, a more global approach, and never forget that there is a hierarchy of values, ideas, and facts. But it’s up to the École des Hautes Études and the scientific institutes to train them. It’s not up to the Sorbonne or the Universities. They have to train teachers who will then make men. They should awaken a great sense of curiosity in students, a sense of what is universal and human, so that later, when those students will themselves have become teachers, the fever of knowledge and a kind of human fervor become the driving force even in the smallest schools of the nation. But in the best of cases we train bookworms; from the age of twenty on, we accustom them to remain inside one drawer of index cards, we train them to compile notes and work their way through it. We cultivate petty vanity in them. For them, knowledge will always consist in adding a card to their file, like a gram to a kilo. Knowledge will distract them from their life, which it should rather enrich and govern. Their curiosity about small things will dispense them from being curious about great ones. Without critical sense, without taste, without ardor, mediocre researchers and worse teachers, they can only maintain our society of quantity in its vain illusion of being a civilization.” (Jean Guéhenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“Never have so many people in Europe known how to read and yet never have there been so many herd animals, so many sheep. In times gone by, a man who didn’t know how to read would save himself through his distrust. He knew he was ignorant, as Descartes did, and he was wary of anyone who spoke too well. He thought by himself — the only way to think. A man today who has learned to read, write, and count is utterly unprotected from his vanity. A degree certifies his knowledge. He believes in it, he’s proud of it. He reads the paper and listens to the radio like everyone else, with everyone else. He is abandoned to the tender mercies of advertising and propaganda. Something is true as soon as he has read it. The truth is in books, isn’t it? He doesn’t realize that the lie is in them, too.”

“I can see this confirmed more every day. Our teaching is far too much about teaching results. All too often, it fosters only the gift for pedantry and a docile memory. A hundred young people I talk to are far more knowledgeable in geometry than Euclid, but few of them are able to reflect that Euclid was a great geometer and that they are nothing. More than the results of the sciences, we should teach their history, reveal to young minds the nature of a moving, active intelligence and communicate the deep meaning of science: get them to understand that a scientist is not a man who knows but a man who seeks, crushed and exalted at the same time by the idea of all that he does not know. Thus we could produce independent, strong men and not vain, servile animals.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“I am reading my students’ papers and suddenly I understand better than I ever have, perhaps, what culture and civilization mean. There are some original temperaments among them, magnificent young barbarians, and I think of the triumph of Apollo, whose chariot is drawn by all the beasts of creation, finally tamed. There are, naturally, young eagles in this class. But there are also young lions, young tigers, as well as a few less dangerous animals. Not for anything in the world would I want to destroy these temperaments. I know all the harm I could do. I am afraid to put out the eagles’ eyes and pull out the lions’ teeth. And yet I do have to discipline all these young animals… Yes, I feel more strongly than ever that a cultivated man is a temperament tamed, but also a temperament that endures and resists. In Europe today I can see a few wild temperaments, and a mass of slaves. So we live in barbarity. Nothing is finer than a temperament that has been tamed, regulated. And I enjoy taming these sincere young animals. I respect their sincerity, I am careful not to kill it, but I gently get them to recognize the world, the others around them, and to match their inside with the outside, their violent sincerity with the truth.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“How can one still write? I can sense the deep connection that links writer to his era as I had never sensed it before. I suddenly feel eighty years old. All the frameworks of thought in which I thought and lived have, perhaps, been destroyed. I feel completely insecure when I write. My thoughts seem to me those of a madman. It is the world which is mad around me. But the effect is the same. The connection between it and me has been destroyed. It was not only pressure from the outside, perhaps, but the ruin inside, too, that reduced German and Italian writers to silence so quickly. It is all abominable.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“Perhaps we no longer realized how much freedom is worth. We talked about it too much. We thought we enjoyed it already. But for too many people it was a word that no longer had any power. They unconsciously submitted to a thousand constraints, made themselves prisoners of ‘propaganda,’ swearing they were free citizens all the while. Enthusiasm for freedom had been deadened by 150 years of bargaining and scheming. As early as the 1850s, Renan was telling the liberals to talk less about liberty and try harder to think freely: liberty would live better from this effort than from all those declamations.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“We all know very well that democracy in this country was not sufficiently real for the conscience of all our citizens to be moved by the scheming, cheating, and intrigues that teams of politicians have indulged in for the past twenty years — teams on different sides, representing opposing interests, but unfortunately all very similar in their presumption, their inconsistency, their fecklessness, and their lack of presence of mind. These politicians were able to jeopardize our happiness and throw us into dangerous ventures.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“June 25. The bells for the ‘Ceasefire’ rang at midnight. I had not realized that I loved my country so much. I am full of pain, anger, and shame. I’ve reached the point where I can’t talk to anyone I suspect of judging this event in a way that differs from mine. At the first word that reveals his spinelessness, his acceptance, I hate him. I feel a kind of physical horror, I move away. That coward, that craven, cannot belong to the same people as I do. At last I can understand all too well how civil wars can be born. I am going to bury myself in silence. I can’t say anything I think out loud. Already we’re settling into servitude. I heard a few of these noble citizens of Auvergne say: ‘Oh, well—they won’t take our mountains.’ Never have eggs, cherries, and strawberries sold so well. Few men really need freedom. I will take refuge in my real country. My country, my France, is a France that cannot be invaded.” (Jean Guehenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944)

“We are no longer accustomed to passion in the natural sciences; it has been replaced by ambition. Our young geniuses are passionately ambitious instead of being passionately passionate; and it has become very difficult to distinguish between what is ardent search for the truth and what is a vigorous promotion campaign. What started as an adventure of the highest has become the survival of the slickest or the quickest.” (Erwin Chargaff, Voices in the Labyrinth)

“The journals were full of models no sooner published than discarded. Even then I counseled moderation, thus contributing to my reputation as a ‘controversial figure.’ I said in a Harvey Lecture in 1956: ‘I should advise to wait and see. Models — in contrast to those who sat for Renoir — improve with age.'” (Erwin Chargaff, 1978, Heraclitean Fire)

“Q: Do you mean to imply that we don’t know enough to fight an intelligent war against cancer?”

“A: Well, wars are never intelligent; but you are correct. The present idea seems to be that we shall select some huge forest and we shall declare that cancer is hidden in there somehow. We shall surround this forest with a huge force of hired beaters who will make a terrific racket to rouse and drive the hidden enemy. Whatever little animal comes running out will be given no quarter; it will be killed, and we shall declare that we have killed cancer. Then the chase will be called off. In the meantime, we shall never be sure that we have picked the right forest and that we have killed the right animal. In other words, we propose to attack cancer as if it were North Vietnam, carpet bombing and so on. The brutish totemistic spirit of Dr. Fix-it is particularly unsuited for this sort of operation. ‘Crash programs’ are more likely to crash the programmers than their objects.”

“Q: Do you wish to say that we should sit and do nothing, and this with all the scientific unemployment?”

“A: Not at all. But more than anything else, we ought to beware of think tanks. For think tanks produce tank thoughts, and this is not the kind of thinking that will ‘conquer’ cancer, if conquest is the right word. I have often wondered whether, behind the much advertised fight against cancer, there does not hide the real motive, namely, to abolish death (of course, for the right kind of people). Are we ready for this? Well, I believe we are ready for anything. How about the abolition of death as a so-called national goal? But what a mess we shall be making! If we preserve the old, we shall have to kill the young. In fact, we have made a beginning in this direction.”

“Q: I can’t say that I understand you; but I seem to hear a senile death wish.”

“A: This may be so. But in my life. I have seen too many ill-considered, harebrained schemes end in misery and total chaos to feel optimistic about our medical do-gooders who are ready anytime to apply the techniques for selling snake oil to the most profound, most unfathomable problems of life and death.” (Erwin Chargaff, 1977, Voices in the Labyrinth)