Heroes prefer self-quotation to self-doubt. Their self-righteousness displaces productive curiosity about how and why they once thought differently, maybe even incorrectly. [...]
I've already admitted the validity of such an argument: the failure of an experiment doesn't necessarily disprove its premises. You don't have to doubt Mozart because Igor Oistrakh plays him badly. But when every virtuoso makes the same piece sound bad, you have every right to suspect the composer.…
West German leftists spared themselves the shock that French intellectuals felt on reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago; instead, they put their energies into an angry critique of French shortsightedness. They themselves, however, never really abandoned the discretion they had long practiced …
The archaic ideal of Nibelung loyalty still counts more than the desire for knowledge.
