Curiosity Kills
I’m a sucker for all quotes about how one thing or another was going to ruin society. Most of these are about media, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw this one about curiosity from an article on The American Scholar:
Specific methods aside, critics argued that unregulated curiosity led to an insatiable desire for novelty—not to true knowledge, which required years of immersion in a subject. Today, in an ever-more-distracted world, that argument resonates. In fact, even though many early critics of natural philosophy come off as shrill and small-minded, it’s a testament to Ball that you occasionally find yourself nodding in agreement with people who ended up on the “wrong” side of history.
I actually think it would be pretty great to collect all these in a big book … A paper book, of course.