“Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”

— Sydney J. Harris

"Purely Personal Prejudices" http://books.google.com/books?id=DLcEAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Nobody+can+be+so+amusingly+arrogant+as+a+young+man+who+has+just+discovered+an+old+idea+and+thinks+it+is+his+own%22&pg=PA227#v=onepage
Strictly Personal (1953)

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Sydney J. Harris 44

American journalist 1917–1986

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Context: He {Wilhelm Reich} had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.
Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned.
Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue.
When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation.

“A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas—ideas which have perhaps been tried and found wanting. As accumulated learning stifles the mental powers, so original thinking has been known to bring about a puffy, unsubstantial mental condition.”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Source: Memoirs (1885), Chapter I, p. 78

“Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”

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Sydney J. Harris 44

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