Time & Perspective Quote by John Buchan

Buchan’s line flatters the teacher and demotes the classroom in one clean stroke. “Close to great minds” isn’t about collecting facts; it’s about absorbing a way of thinking by proximity, the political version of apprenticeship. The phrasing assumes that intelligence is contagious, that character and judgment leak across the boundaries of conversation, dinner tables, and cabinet rooms. It’s a worldview built for a governing class: the best education is not mass instruction but curated access.

That subtext matters because Buchan wasn’t an armchair aphorist. As a politician and public servant in an era when Britain’s institutions still ran on networks, patronage, and elite grooming, he’s describing how power reproduces itself. “For a time” suggests strategic immersion rather than permanent deference: you orbit the “great,” learn their habits of mind, then go do something with it. The line quietly recasts mentorship as merit-making, which is convenient for systems that want to believe they select the best rather than the best-connected.

It also works because it has the austere confidence of a maxim that doesn’t beg to be liked. Buchan implies that books and lectures can sharpen you, but they can’t fully teach judgment under pressure: how to weigh trade-offs, read a room, make decisions with incomplete information. The romance here is intellectual intimacy; the risk is hierarchy disguised as pedagogy.