The greatest science is always self-financed
Science must be cultivated by free people. Only on this condition will they succeed in emancipating themselves from the state, capitaland of the bourgeois mediocrity which stifles them. What means does the scientist of today have to do reasearch that interest them? Should they ask help of the state, which can only be given to one candidate in a hundred, and which they can only obtain who promises ostensibly to keep to the beaten track?
This is why all of the greatest studies and scientific discoveries have been made outside academies and universities, either by people already rich enough to remain independent, or by poeple who undermined their health by working in poverty, and often in great straits, losing endless time for the want of a laboratory, and unable to obtain the instruments or literature necessary to continue their research, but persevering against hope, and often dying before they had reached the end in view.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 9. The need for luxury (p. 158).