How humbling is this silence, this stupidity, this numbness. How modest has your endowment turned out to be. How horrifying is this vacuum that stares at you belligerently once again. And yet, how glorious is your determination, your blind faith, your demented will to persist against your better judgment. How impervious you have become to defeat. Indeed, how essential are insects like you to the march of our civilization.

Addendum (May 3, 1990)

There seems to be only one solution to the problem: that the élite of mankind acquire a consciousness of the limitation of the human mind, at once simple and profound enough, humble and sublime enough, so that Western civilization will resign itself to its inevitable disadvantages.

From Guglielmo Ferrero’s The Principles of Power, New York, 1942, p. 318, quoted by Friedrich A. Hayek in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. I, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 1.