There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902), Letter (23 January 1861), published in Lord Acton and his Circle (1906), by Abbot Francis Aidan Gasquet, Letter 74.
It is a general law in politics, that the power most to be distrusted, is that which, possessing the greatest force, is the least responsible.
James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (1838).
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (January 10, 1834 – June 19, 1902), The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.
Umberto Eco, “Can Television Teach?” in Screen Education 31 (1979), p. 12.
This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929).
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (1962).
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), opening sentence.
Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d’état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn’t called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.
Umberto Eco, Il costume di casa (1973); as translated in Travels in Hyperreality (1986).
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas, The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (New York: Knopf, 1928). This idea was developed by sociologist Robert K. Merton in regards to “the self-fulfilling prophecy,” see “The Thomas Theorem and the Matthew Effect”. Social Forces. 74 (2): 379–422.
The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual cooperation with corresponding groups in other states, not between the public powers of rival States.
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (1910).