Laudator Temporis Acti

Ronald Knox (1888-1957), Broadcast Minds (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932), p. 21:

Unless we are of those few who can claim to know everything about something, it only remains that we should pride ourselves on knowing something about everything. We must all have recourse to the little handbooks sooner or later. And the people whom I am criticizing, whose methods I am questioning in this book, are not the people who derive their knowledge of most subjects from second-hand information; they do not differ in that from the rest of us; but people who select from the little handbooks those statements, those points of view which tell in favour of the thesis they want to establish, concealing any statements or points of view which tell in a contrary direction, and then serve up the whole to us as the best conclusions of modern research, disarming all opposition by appealing to the sacred name of science. It is these people I call the omniscientists.