… is from page 119 of the late Michael Novak’s 1981 essay “In Praise of Bourgeois Virtues,” as this essay is reprinted in the 1999 collection of some of Novak’s pieces, On Cultivating Liberty: Reflections on Moral Ecology (Brian C. Anderson, ed.):
Human offspring require some twenty years of nurture. Three thousand years of civilization must be passed on to children during those years; without that, progress would halt.
