“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer)

“There are people who occasionally engage in thinking when they have nothing better to do. It is a harmless activity, much practiced in former times, but now unfortunately fallen into desuetude. There is so much else to do. Montaigne, the greatest master of latitudinal thinking, roamed widely, if not always profoundly: there was virtually nothing that could not serve him as a hook on which to hang his thought, his reminiscences and remarks. His Essays have been greatly admired for nearly four hundred years; whether they still are read widely I do not know. He wrote at a time when the languages of antiquity enjoyed a vigorous afterlife which now has surely come to a regrettable end; the many quotations from ancient authors with which his writings are adorned so richly, as with so many strings of pearls, can now hardly find a receptive ear.” (Chargaff, Serious Questions)

“If the world can still be saved, it will be saved by the amateurs. The experts are more than most other people responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves. They know too much about too little, but each knows something special. They can barely understand each other; they do not talk with each other; they sit and serve. To the lay world, they are of very limited use. If you want to tap them, you must know exactly where: the barrels are studded all over with false faucets, releasing nothing but hot air. Only one spigot communicates with the fount of expert knowledge, ready to drench you with more than you wish to know.” (Chargaff, Serious Questions)

Aurora interea miseris mortalibus almam
extulerat lucem, referens opera atque labores.
(Virgil, Aeneid, Book XI)

Aurora rose, spreading her pitying light,
And with it bringing back to sight the labors
Of sad mortality, what men have done,
And what has been done to them; and what they must do
To mourn.
(David Ferry, 2017)

Meanwhile, Dawn raised her nurturing light and summoned
Wretched mankind to its work and hardship.
(Sarah Ruden, 2008)

Soon
the Dawn had raised her light that gives men life,
wretched men, calling them back to labor
and mortal struggle.
(Robert Fagles, 2006)

Dawn at that hour
Brought on her kindly light for ill mankind,
Arousing men to labor and distress.
(Robert Fitzgerald, 1981)

Meanwhile Dawn had lifted up her kindly light for weary men,
recalling them to task and toil.
(H Rushton Fairclough, 1918; Revised by GP Goold, 2000)

The morn had now dispell’d the shades of night,
Restoring toils, when she restor’d the light.
(John Dryden, 1697)

“A single cause linked to a single effect is not an historical but a laboratory possibility. The difference between them is that life presents a multiplicity of conditions, all of which are causes, whereas laboratory technique permits the artificial isolation and control of single conditions in a one-to-one relation within a closed system.” (Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors)