Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. O...f all weaknesses he most disliked timed and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong's pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than ...forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because... he knows others worthy of consideration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most maxim-mongers have preferred the prettiness to the justness of a thought, and the turn to the truth; but I have refused mysel...f to everything that my own experience did not justify and confirm.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those w...ho are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »