I don't think anything could be closer in description than this to the rubbishing of Wilde and his genius by a society obsessed by appearances and indifferent to imagination.
Jack Ma's Alibaba, Baidu and the rest of China's high-tech companies are clear evidence of the entrepreneurial genius of Chinese society when left to its own devices.
The genius of modern societies is the way they release individual creativity; the danger is growing shared risks.
Handel arrived in the capital on the back of the Hanoverian court and a taste for Italian opera, and quickly established a reputation in London society for genius and personal charm.
But today is about something else: today is about the extraordinary and essential role artists play in our society, their genius, their needs, their contribution to what matters in all our lives.
This populist impulse was to find its apotheosis in the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1853, a transcendent (if financially disastrous) mixture of fine arts, crafts and industrial achievement that one editorial grandiloquently called a "Republican lesson on the capacities of man, the dignities of labor, and on the obligations of society to genius and toil".
Jane Austen, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Miss Austen's novels… seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
What has happened to society's geniuses, where are they today? he wonders.
Heinlein's story describes a secret society of geniuses called the New Men who train themselves to think more rapidly and precisely using a language called Speedtalk, which is capable of condensing entire sentences into single words.
