Men found themselves possessed of the means of communicating with people all over the world. A new sort of tribunal had come into existence in which less lively but deeper impressions were communicated; which no longer allowed the same tyrannical empire to be exercised over men’s passions but ensured a more certain and more durable power over their minds; a situation in which the advantages are all on the side of truth, since what the art of communication loses in the power to seduce it gains in the power to enlighten.

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), on the subject of print