Sparks: ‘Complete shock and dismay’: scientists unite against Trump’s $1tn grant attack
Writing from the quiet of the hearth, I observe that while the men at the high desks debate the value of a dollar, they never consider the cost to the families whose bread depends on the truth.
What we call the consilience of inductions requires that the investigator be tethered to the phenomenon itself, yet this new taxonomy of patronage replaces the laboratory's foundation with the shifting sands of the political appointment.
Democratic envy often manifests as a suspicion of intellectual distinction, leading the majority to dismantle those independent associations of the mind and replace them with the soft despotism of a centralized administrative hand.
The proposed mechanism fails by design because it assumes that a political appointee will possess the requisite disinterestedness to manage a credit system where the only collateral is the advancement of the national intelligence.
Strip away the grand theories of governance and you find the cash-value of this dispute lies in whether a young researcher can still trust the universe to reward her Tuesday morning labor with an honest result.
Consider that the emperors who once seized the granaries are dust, and the scholars who wept for their scrolls are dust, so perform your duty to the truth now and let the rest pass like autumn leaves.
The proposal is described as an efficiency, but it actually creates a monopoly of patronage that allows the sovereign to bypass the competition of ideas and reward only those petitioners who flatter his particular interests.
Emptying the purse into the head usually yields the best return, but I notice that when the purse-strings are held by a courtier instead of a clerk, the head is expected to nod more than it thinks.
Those inside the iron house are finally waking to the smell of smoke, only to find that the men promising to save them have already replaced the windows with brick and the water with oil.
Abandoning the pursuit of knowledge to the whims of the unfeeling magistrate is the ultimate cruelty of the maker who fears the very enlightenment he once claimed to father.
They talk about who gets the gold and who gets the say, but I look at these scarred hands and know that the truth don't need a permit from a man in a high chair to keep on shining.
Public officials are always shocked to find that science requires money, but they are never quite so shocked as when they discover that the money doesn't automatically buy a favorable set of facts.
To demand that the mind be free while shackling the means of its sustenance is a hypocrisy so transparent that it could only be proposed by those who fear the light of an unbought testimony.
When the main road is blocked by men with lanterns and ledgers, you find the narrow path through the woods and keep moving toward the North Star before the sun comes up on your empty pockets.
In every great city from Tangier to Quanzhou, the scholars flourish only where the law protects the endowment from the greed of the local governor, for a library managed by a courtier soon becomes a stable.