Keeping progress alive

The advantage to society of energetic intellectual activity is that it offers society self-awareness, wakefulness and clarity, inspiration and new ideas, and intelligence in debate and action. A sluggard community which never asks questions or inspects the world around it with a bright eye, and which never tries out different ways of understanding its circumstances, is sure first to stagnate, and then to slip backwards.

~ A. C. Grayling, The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the 21st Century (2006)