- ...Our society is more than happy to accept spin and cant because
we have come to believe that all expertise is bias, that all knowledge
is opinion, that every judgment is relative. I see this daily in my
university classroom. Many of even my best students seem to have lost
the ability to think critically about the world. They do not believe
in the transformative power of knowledge because they do not believe in
knowledge itself. [...] It is built into
our carefully balanced political "debates", into our news shows with
equal time given to pundits from each side and into the "fairness" we
try to teach in our schools. We need not be surprised that people
have become consumers who demand the right to choose as they wish
between the two equally questionable sides of every story. [No]
serious problem can be addressed by a society that equates willful
ignorance with freedom of thought.
|
| —
| Bernard Dov Cooperman
Dept. of History, University of
Maryland
College Park Maryland
|
Source: Newsweek,
September 3, 2007
- Never underestimate politics' resistance to reality when it is in
the throes of an ideological lust.
Source: The
Independent Record, Helena, MT
- News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else
is publicity.
Source: Common
Dreams News Center
- As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more
closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On
some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their
heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a
downright moron.
Source: On
Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-801-85342-7. p. 21.
- A blind man in a room full of deaf people
|
| —
| former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill,
describing his impression of President George W. Bush in Cabinet meetings
|
Source: BBC
News, 1/10/2004
-
Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the
leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's
always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a
democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to
the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
|
| —
| Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
|
Source: Gilbert, G.M.
Nuremberg Diary; New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947