"[The] author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself"

Source: Sir Peter Medawar review of Teilhard de Chradin's The Phenomenon of Man. Fuller quote: "It is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hereabouts called it the Book of the Year --- one, the Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. "