Senator Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
Robert Wilson: No sir, I don’t believe so.
Pastore: Nothing at all?
Wilson: Nothing at all.
Pastore: It has no value in that respect?
Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
==It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets?
I don’t want painters, sculptors, poets, or any other aspiring culture-monger subsidized by the government either.
“A ‘faith in culture’ is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. ‘Culture’ as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a ‘platform’, is unendurable.”
-C.S. Lewis, Lilies that Fester