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From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

Book by Jacques Barzun · 7 quotes · Artificial Intelligence, Christianity, Emotions

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From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present Quotes

“We play fast and loose with the words human and inhuman, flattering ourselves by making human mean only the good things in our makeup or simply what we approve. The historian cannot subscribe to this policy, knowing as he does that cruelty, murder, and massacre are among the most characteristic human acts.”

Human Nature
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
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“if one consults reason alone, one cannot assent to the articles of our faith" it was full of mysteries; "we are fools to try to explain them." This makes preaching Christianity not only a hard task but also dangerous. "Had I know, I should never have been a preacher.”

ReasonFaithChristianityPreachingMysteries
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
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“The obvious part is that the machine makes us its captive servants - by its rhythm, by its convenience, by the cost of stopping it or the drawbacks of not using it. As captives we come to resemble it in our pace, rigidity and uniform expectations. But there is in mechanism a subtler influence. The machine is an agent of abstraction. It is itself an abstraction in that it does one particular task (or at most two or three) and yields identical products. There is no fringe or fancy, no happy error or sudden innovation as in the handworker's performance. That is why machine-made things rarely draw our glance more than the few times when they are new and handy. They induce no subsequent reverie, no speculation, and no love, The robot is a repulsive caricature of Man. When the domestic or public landscape is filled with objects deprived of any aura, it is as if the world of living things had been reduced by abstraction to something emphatically not alive.”

Artificial IntelligenceRobotsIndustrialisationMachines And Man
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
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“The one drawback to print is that the uniform finality of black on white leads the innocent to believe that every word so enshrined is true. And when these truths diverge from book to book (for the incentive to write and publish is also increased), the intellectual life is changed. From being more or less a duel, it becomes a free-for-all. The scrimmage makes for a blur of ideas, now accepted as a constant and fondly believed to be, like the free market, the ideal method for sifting truth.”

IdeasPrintingTruth TellingMisinformation Of The Masses
Book:From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
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