Wish I'd said that - September 10, 2020

“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries…. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.”

Michael Oakeshott “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” in Rationalism in politics and other essays