Gottfried Benn quote
There he stands, the narrow little man- and animal-head, thinking, whiffling, woolgathering â it doesnât occur to anyone that the medieval luminaries were no members of learned societies, no massed ranks of professors, no suppliers of factory secrets, actually no scientists at all, but unpaid daimons: ârather sleep on oxhides than on dignity and respectâ, while all this here, fully hundred years from the last real intellectual breakthrough, pampered by a century of liberalism and ease; with instruments, formulas, textbooks that it has inherited or purchased, following recipes that it carries on gurgitating and regurgitating, its casuistical underpinning vital at most for an exam candidate, inflated into a philosophy of life, swilled with the help of press and photographers into the color magazines and soignĂ© evening classes to persuade a wider public (âtomorrow a ventriloquist, the day after the tomato gospelâ) of its relevance; a bureacucracy of research scientists broken up by pay-grade, an international civilisation guild with full pension rights, that could perfectly well be replaced en bloc by an equal number of grad students and an equal number of hemorrhoids.
Believe it or not, it was written in Berlin in 1930 by Gottfried Benn.