Quote by Walter Lippmann on Ideas and Authority
“Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.”
Walter Lippmann
Author Archive for: Jan
Entries by Jan
Questioning Opinion Formation – Walter Lippmann Quote
“It is often very illuminating…to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”
Walter Lippmann
Successful Politicians Are Insecure People – Walter Lippmann
“Successful … politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.”
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann Quote on Feelings and Perception
“The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event … For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.”
Walter Lippmann
Influence of the Zeitgeist – Bernardo Kastrup
“Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any person inserted in a modern cultural context to escape the haze of the zeitgeist and develop a truly unbiased, critical, and personal worldview.”
Bernardo Kastrup
“There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions” – Milton Friedman
“There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.”
Milton Friedman
John Taylor Gatto on Schooling and Exceptional Talent
“As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (…)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.”
John Taylor Gatto
Ayn Rand on Socialism and Fascism
“The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”
Ayn Rand
“The Great Advances of Civilization” – Quote by Milton Friedman
“The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”
Milton Friedman
John Taylor Gatto Quote on Compulsory Schooling
“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
John Taylor Gatto