… is from page 64 of Will and Ariel Durant’s 1967 volume Rousseau and Revolution:
The triumph of imagination over reality is one of the humors of history.
DBx: And an ill humor it has certainly been. It’s one thing to imagine realistically – to imagine with the understanding that reality isn’t optional; it’s called innovation. Successful entrepreneurs imagine realistically. But it’s quite another thing to imagine that reality is optional, which is the kind of imagining that is done by far too many political philosophers and others who fancy themselves ordained to re-engineer society toward their imagined utopias.
