Erasmus, on why you should never let thinktankers near government:
“… if you consult historians, you’ll find no princes more pestilent to the commonwealth than where the empire has fallen to some smatterer in philosophy or one given to letters”
Erasmus: In praise of folly
And he has some praise for bloggers too….
“how much happier is this my writer’s dotage who never studies for anything but puts in writing whatever he pleases or what comes first in his head, though it be but his dreams; and all this with small waste of paper, as well knowing that the vainer those trifles are, the higher esteem they will have with the greater number, that is to say all the fools and unlearned. “
True dat.
2 Comments
July 14, 2009 at 10:55 am
“the vainer those trifles are, the higher esteem they will have”
Isn’t that the Comment is Free commissioning policy?
July 14, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I used to blog under this quote (well a bit of it )
“In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read ….; righting every kind of wrong, .”