Stoics vs. The Steam Engine

Thomas Macaulay, Essay on Bacon:

“An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities. The wise man of the Stoics would, no doubt, be a grander object than a steam-engine. But there are steamengines. And the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born.”

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