When a people are confronted with problems that are both incomprehensible and unbearable, they lash out not at those who contrived the problems but at those who expose them. When they are confronted by moral problems that they find insoluble, or perhaps intolerable, they blame the moralists. The anxieties, tensions, revulsions of our day create an atmosphere in which it is almost impossible to think clearly and dispassionately about just those problems which most imperatively require reason and objectivity — problems of adjustment to fundamental change.
Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) American historian, writer, activist
“The University and the Community of Learning,” speech, Kent State University, Ohio (10 Apr 1971)
(Source)
Quotations about:
reactionary
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When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.
Alan Paton (1903-1988) South African author, activist
“The Challenge of Fear,” The Saturday Review (9 Sep 1967)
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Reprinted in Sheridan Baker, The Essayist (1981).
The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) American writer, journalist, activist, politician
The Profits of Religion, Book Two: “The Church of Good Society,” “The Canonization of Incompetence” (1917)
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Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on the subjects he knows about.
Robert Conquest (b. 1917) Anglo-American historian, diplomat, poet
“Conquest’s Law”
Attributed in Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)
Variant: "Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands."
