03/04/2024

The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation: hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts and technicians – the Graeculus esuriens – the remote but unmistakable ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian Age – the terrible Eighteenth Century – all the avocasserie and écrivasserie, the miserable crew of attorneys and scribblers, with the predatory, sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and self-destructive, because blind and deaf to the true word of God.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox