To Know Only One Thing Well Is To Have A Barbaric Mind

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To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind:
civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of
experience to a central humane system of thought. The present
age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar
to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and
the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the
weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress,
which is usual in this barbaric age).
-- Robert Graves

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