“One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.”
Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 13: Heroic Materialism
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Kenneth Clark 47
Art historian, broadcaster and museum director 1903–1983Related quotes
“Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.”
“It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 21, “And Southward Aye We Fled” (p. 106)
OSCON 2002
Context: Here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use; it's an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it's unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book — that's regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there's this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else. For example, quoting a text in another text — that's a copy, but it's a still fair use. That means the world was divided into three camps, not two: Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories.
Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, "What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?" I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control?
It got downright mystifying just trying to figure out which was worse. At nineteen, it’s hard to know how to act.
Source: The Night We Buried Road Dog (1993), p. 463
“Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.”
Book I, ch. 16.
Discourses
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.
