“The enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America… acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon forgotten, while ignoring all that is exquisite and rare.”

—  Logan Pearsall Smith

“Fine Writing,” p. 308
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America… acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon …" by Logan Pearsall Smith?
Logan Pearsall Smith photo
Logan Pearsall Smith 37
British American-born writer 1865–1946

Related quotes

R. H. Tawney photo

“England has not yet imitated the example set by America and by most of the British Dominions in making public secondary education free.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Secondary Education For All (1922)

William Wordsworth photo

“Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Hart-leap Well, part ii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Enormous resources are invested in pseudoscience that could be better invested in improving the health and education of the public.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 5, “Pseudoscience: What Some People Do Isn’t Science” (p. 95)

George Moore (novelist) photo

“The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Vain Fortune http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11303/11303.txt, Chapter 1 (1891).

Robert Maynard Hutchins photo

“Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western tradition.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Donald J. Trump photo

“The days of deadly ignorance will end, and they will end soon.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, June, Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)

“"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." These words which bring to a close Spinoza's masterpiece Ethics, after the manner of Geometry, sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 37: Chapter 2. Benedict de Spinoza, 1632-1677

Calvin Coolidge photo

“The public press under an autocracy is necessarily a true agency of propaganda. Under a free government it must be the very reverse. Propaganda seeks to present a part of the facts, to distort their relations, and to force conclusions which could not be drawn from a complete and candid survey of all the facts. It has been observed that propaganda seeks to close the mind, while education seeks to open it. This has become one of the dangers of the present day.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Oscar Wilde photo

“In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated (1894)

Philip Pullman photo

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. is soon forgotten, butlasts forever.”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

Related topics