Robert Musil Quote

What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.

Translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, Novellas (p. 9), University of Chicago Press. 1990