It is worth reminding ourselves that one can be entirely sincere and firm in one’s convictions–and entirely wrong. We must accept responsibility for whether we are right or wrong….Man’s “unlimited potential” is a term one hears often, and we are adjured to “fulfill it” as much as possible….The error is in treating potential as if it had no limits at all, as though life’s course were perpetually “onward and upward.” The illusion that we become “good” by progressing a little more each day is a doctrine bootlegged from technology and made into a dogma in ethics where it does not fit….in ethics, in aesthetics, in other matters of the spirit, the term progress in that sense has no place. Modern man is not ethically superior to Socrates and the Greeks, and although we build buildings differently  we do not make them more beautiful than the parthenon.  (From Power and Innocence.)