from Hacker News

These things, which we state lightly enough here, are yet of deep import and indicate a mighty change in our whole manner of existence. For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavor and in natural force of any kind. Not for internal perfection but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions—for mechanism of one sort or other do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism and are of a mechanical character. -- Thomas Carlyle

No other period of civilization has been so dependent for survival on hypocrisy as the belle epoque, the late post-Victorian age. It has bequeathed us a heritage of lies that we are now painfully charged with erasing, like a huge national debt. The prejudice that the scientist's search for the truth shall be free from emotion, from pettiness, from the passions of the world has been nurtured for over a century by biographers whose faith in science was too weak. One shudders to guess how many talented young minds have been deflected from science by the reading of such unrealistic portrayals of great scientists. -- Gian-Carlo Rota