“The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.”

Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII, 64

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 1, The Quest For Reality, p. 2

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)
Context: It is a remarkable fact in the history of science, that the more extended human knowledge has become, the more limited human power, in that respect, has constantly appeared. This globe, of which man imagines the haughty possessor, becomes, in the eyes of astronomer, merely a grain of dust floating in immensity of space: an earthquake, a tempest, an inundation, may destroy in an instant an entire people, or ruin the labours of twenty ages.... But if each step in the career of science thus gradually diminishes his importance, his pride has a compensation in the greater idea of his intellectual power, by which he has been enabled to perceive those laws which seem to be, by their nature, placed for ever beyond his grasp.

p, 125
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)
Context: The human mind in all countries having gone to the uttermost limit of its own capacity, flushed with its conquests, haughty after its self-assertion upon emerging from the prior dark age, is now nearing a new phase, a phase inherent in the nature and destiny of things.
The human mind, like the silk-worm oppressed with the fullness of its own accumulation, has spun about itself gradually and slowly a cocoon that at last has shut out the light of the world from which it drew the substance of its thread. But this darkness has produced the chrysalis, and we within the darkness feel the beginning of our throes. The inevitable change, after centuries upon centuries of preparation, is about to begin.

Speech at Princeton University (1995), as quoted in a Scalia profile published by The Christian Science Monitor http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/1998/03/03/us/us.3.html.
1990s

Source: The Great Gatsby

"Towards the Twenty-First Century" (1972), p. 169
The Culture We Deserve (1989)
Context: The only political ism surviving in full strength from the past is nationalism. This was partly to be expected from the liberation of so many colonies simultaneously, beginning in the 1920s. But this nationalism differs from the old in two remarkable ways: it is not patriotic and it does not want to absorb and assimilate. On the contrary, it wants to shrink and secede, to limit its control to its one small group of like-minded-we-ourselves-alone. It is in that sense racist, particularist, sectarian, minority-inspired.