Yet, while tobacco and the newly dominant Southern crop, cotton, put Southern roots ever deeper into the soil, the fisheries drew New England out tow… - Daniel J. Boorstin

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita — unknown territory.

Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world’s problems can really be settled by “statements,” by “Summit” meetings, by a competition of “prestige,” by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.

Plato's Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle's legacy was a body of knowledge, marking the path of modern learning-accumulating the facts of the world and human experience with an explanation of causes. Aristotle's legacy, then, was not the power of a charismatic personality of grand poetic gifts, but rather the accumulation of a lifetime of scholarly observation. And before Aristotle's writings were recovered by Andronicus, there were centuries of opportunity for his ideas to be distorted. Plato's was an unbroken tradition, Aristotle's was a series of renaissances.