This Behavioral Tendency of Man Towards…

This behavioral tendency of man towards his contemporaries is very peculiar: at the same time that he is unimpressed with, when he does not despise, the truly extraordinary, he endorses and praises everything that makes up the range from the mediocre to the truly despicable. That is why one can never trust a contemporaneous judgment on anything, at the risk of embarking on the most scandalous frauds and injustices. We always have to wait for history to dispassionately put everything in its proper place.