Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
C.P. SnowWhat will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.
C.P. SnowA good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
C.P. SnowI was moving among two groups... who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral, and psychological climate had so little in common that... one might have crossed the ocean.
C.P. Snow