"He might have known that he was debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men didd, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive force than merely to see the world as it was. This perversity--and he was perverse whether he realized it or not--made him the most conspicuous single example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization."
--Cultural Amnesia by Clive James [emphasis is not the author's], pg. 671
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