Word: darwins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...chose that year because in 1859 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Karl Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, Richard Wagner finished Tristan und Isolde. These three were the intellectual forebears of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini. They were the intellectual forebears of nearly everybody else in the Western world too. And, says Author Barzun, "it would be hard to find in the whole history of Western civilization a corresponding trio to share the honors of a single epoch with such perfect parallelism...
...Germany's West Front should have been named the Siegfried Line; that the new regimes of force should have taken the title of social ist; or that the most powerful myth of today should be a mixture of biological, economic and cultural dogmas. The 20th Century . . . belongs to Darwin, Marx and Wagner. ... So true is this that the ordinary educated man of today sees no third choice between the 'scientific ideas' of the late 19th Century and the 'obscurantism and superstition of the Middle Ages...
Author of Quotation No. 1: Charles Darwin; author of Quotation No. 2: Dr. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi labor front...
Some three-fourths of Author Barzun's book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, which serve as background for the development of their ideas. Barzun describes Darwin's difficulties in getting famed British Publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (a title whose four great phrases seem to Barzun "a stroke of genius...
Murray considered Darwin's theory "as absurd as contemplating the fruitful union of a poker and a rabbit," suggested that Darwin bring out only his observations on pigeons-"everybody is interested in pigeons." The public thought otherwise, bought up one edition after another...