“If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.”
Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 3
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Bernard Williams 9
English moral philosopher 1929–2003Related quotes
“The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.”

“Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.”
Attributed in Watergate and the White House, Volumes 1-2 (1973) by Edward W. Knappman, p. 100; this has also become paraphrased as "Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke".
Attributions

Computer Lib
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

“My main objective is to be professional but to kill him.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/boxing/1961080.stm
On Lennox Lewis

[O] : Introduction, 0.8
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages. By studying the human signifying activity it influences its course. A general semiotics transforms, for the very fact of its theoretical claim, its own object.