I love this insight from Matthew Arnold; it’s from his Culture and Anarchy.
This is the social idea; and the men of
culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are
those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying
from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas
of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth,
difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it to make it efficient
outside the clique of the cultivated and learned , yet still reaming the best knowledge and thoughts of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness
and light.
(HT to my close friend Lyle Albaugh.)
