No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.

The art of watching has become mere skill at rapid apperception and understanding of continuously changing visual images. The younger generation has acquired this cinematic perception to an amazing degree.

Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Nelson's famous signal before the Battle of Trafalgar was not: "England expects that every man will be a hero." It said: "Englandexpects that every man will do his duty." In 1805 that was enough. It should still be.

William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?

Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.