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Prism

(5,815 posts) Sat Mar 16, 2013, 03:33 PM Mar 2013

Catherine the Great on academic vs practical

Reading a few flamey topics this week, I thought of this quote by Catherine to French philosopher Diderot.

"You work on paper, which will suffer anything. As for me, poor empress, I work on human skin, which is quite otherwise; irritable and ticklish."

If academic notions of how things ought to be do not take into consideration contemporary human realities of society and culture, they will often remain just that -academic. A pen is a chilly thing until first warmed by a human mind.