Quotes from Susan Jacoby

The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between.

We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation, and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with our conclusions. Philosophy has not the egotism of faith.

THE MIND OF THIS COUNTRY, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital.

The revolutionary idea that children have rights was born in the Enlightenment, but the practical application of that concept, in schools and within families, was very much a product of the progressive side of the Victorian era.

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will.

Sincere religious faith is both a relationship and a love affair. That is one of the many reasons atheism is not a religion.

The denigration of fairness has infected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another.

The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions.

In today's America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism.

It is surely true that few people like to consider themselves enemies of thought and culture. Bush, after all, called himself the "education president" with a straight face while simultaneously declaring, without a trace of self-consciousness or self-criticism, that he rarely read newspapers because that would expose him to "opinions.

However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas that do not involve straightforward attempts at censorship or intimidation. The suggestion that there is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language is one of them.

The explicit distinction between those who are fit only to study and those who are history's actors not only expresses contempt for intellectuals but also denigrates anyone who requires evidence, rather than power and emotion, as justification for public policy.

Americans' enthusiasm for apocalyptic fantasy probably owes more to movies like The Exorcist and The Omen than to the Bible itself.

What is most disturbing, apart from the fact that millions of Americans already believe in the imminent end of days, is that the mainstream media confer respectability on such bizarre fantasies by taking them seriously.

Now that science has attained its youth," Ingersoll said, "and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: 'Let us be friends.' It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: 'Let us agree not to step on each other's feet.'"12

They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought.

They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.

By then, the coupling of atheism with Communism had become a staple in the rhetoric of anti-Communist crusaders throughout the nation. Intellectuals as a group were highly vulnerable on this score because many were, if not unabashed atheists, secular humanists with little regard for traditional religion. If

From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is clear that the golden age of freethought, which stretched roughly from 1875 until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as the culture wars of the past three decades.

The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation. It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.

But secularists are not value free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments.

Obama, of course, is an outstanding orator—but even outstanding orators (unlike nineteenth-century presidents) feel obliged to dumb their words down a bit for the American public. President Donald Trump, however, is proud of his limited tweetish vocabulary. "I know words," he declared at a campaign appearance in Hilton Head, South Carolina. "I have the best words. But there is no better word than stupid. Right?

Memory, which depends on the capacity to absorb ideas and information through exposition and to connect new information to an established edifice of knowledge, is one of the first victims of video culture. Without memory, judgments are made on the unsound basis of the most recent bit of half-digested information.

As George Orwell noted in 1946, "A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fall all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.