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… is from page 32 of Joseph Epstein’s 1999 book, Narcissus Leaves the Pool [2]:
The cultivated person is good at the art of extrapolation: at imagining the unknown on the evidence of the known. He has a strong historical sense, so that he tends to be less impressed by the crisis of the week that agitates the news media, which they in turn use to agitate the rest of us. From his historical sense, he knows that this caravan has passed before, and that another, not very different one will pass through next week and another the week after that.