Tweet [1]
… is from page 119 of the late Michael Novak [2]’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 [3] (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.