Quotables: Ideas Have Consequences

Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver

As the modern world is organized, the ordinary readers seems to lose means of private judgment, and the decay of conversation has about destroyed the practice of dialectic. Consequently the habit of credulity grows. {p. 97}

Jefferson observed at one time that it would be better to have newspapers and lack a government than to have a government and be without newspapers. Yet we find him in his seventieth year writing to John Adams: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier.” {p. 98-99}

The radio is…the cheerful liar. {p. 103}

For turning whole populations into mute recipients of authoritative edicts, what better means could there be? {p. 103-104}

[T]he operators of the Great Stereopticon have an interest in keeping people from breaking through to deeper significances. Not only is the philosopher a notoriously poor consumer, he is also an unsettling influence on societies careless of justice. {p. 105-106}