After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way.
Isaac AsimovThe fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity โ a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.
Isaac Asimov