Open Quotes

“In the past, the great effervescences of history -- those major episodes of openness and progress -- petered out because of what has been called Cardwell's Law, after the technology historian Donald S. Cardwell. Innovation always faces resistance from groups that think they stand to lose from it, be they old political or religious elites, businesses with old technologies, workers with outmoded skills, nostalgic romantics, or old folks who feel anxious because people just don't do things the way they used to.”
― Johan Norberg, Open: The Story of Human Progress

“When Hitler purged German universities of Jews it was like bombing his own armoury of knowledge and science. The dismissed represented not only 16 per cent of all Germany’s physicists, chemists and mathematicians, but as much as 50 per cent of all the citations to papers published before 1933. Eleven of the dismissed scholars were past or future Nobel Prize winners.44”
― Johan Norberg, Open: The Story of Human Progress