The Man Who Knew Too Much (Xist Classics)

"I mean they're not thick enough. By making things mathematical they make them thin. Take the living lines out of that landscape, simplify it to a right angle, and you flatten it out to a mere diagram on paper. Diagrams have their own beauty; but it is of just the other sort.

"I shall never come to the end of your interests, Fisher. I should say that what you don't know isn't worth knowing." "You are wrong," replied Fisher, with a very unusual abruptness, and even bitterness. "It's what I do know that isn't worth knowing.

"Well, I am a trifle tired," said Fisher, "of the Simple Life and the Strenuous Life as lived by our little set. We're all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something.

I am too tangled up with the whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to set it right. You look distressed, not to say shocked, and I'm not at all offended at it.

They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes everywhere with the extension of education.

"I think a good many things," replied the other. "If you people ever happen to blow the whole tangle of society to hell with dynamite, I don't know that the human race will be much the worse. But don't be too hard on me merely because I know what society is. That's why I moon away my time over things like stinking fish."

"I'm ashamed of myself," replied Fisher. "I've just been throwing cold water on the enthusiasms of a boy." "Even that explanation is hardly exhaustive," observed the criminal expert. "Damned newspaper nonsense the enthusiasms were, of course," continued Fisher, "but I ought to know that at that age illus

"I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything," said Horne Fisher. "I don't mean especially about Ireland. I mean about England. I mean about the whole way we are governed, and perhaps the only way we can be governed.