Everett Dean Martin Quotes

The greater the industrial and political organization, the greater is the emphasis on the individual as a mere mass unit, and the smaller his importance as a single separate person.

The student of social psychology ... is concerned not so much with the panaceas that may be proposed for the solution of the economic problems, but is interested rather in the possibility that under any economic system a maximum number of people should be able to grow from infantile tribal ways to self-directing maturity.

Education is emancipation from herd opinion, self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and urbanity.

The attitude of authority discourages the spirit of search and criticism. Popular prejudice is entrenched. Non-essentials are over-emphasized. Crowd-mindedness, rather than independence of judgment, prevails.

The evil effect of these attempts to manipulate the multitude by pampering its weaknesses---in return for material and other advantages to persons and for ends not disclosed—is clearly seen in various aspects of our common life. In politics such effect have long been deplorable.

Probably the greatest difference among men is this difference in habits of thought. There are some minds which behave merely like the mechanic who having learned his trade in a certain way never can function in any other.

Individuality is a cultural achievement rather than a gift of nature. During the 19th century it was rather common for people to believe they were expressing their individuality by being "natural."

By the term individual I shall mean that in which each of us is peculiarly himself. I shall emphasize not what is common is us, but what is uncommon, and this leads me to a restatement of our question. In considering what is happening to the individual, I shall discuss what in modern civilization is happening to the uncommon in us. Are we becoming more common or more uncommon? Are the common people destroying the uncommon? Is the public self of us crushing out the personal self? Are we being directed more from without than from within? As our group memberships grow larger, do we as persons tend to grow smaller? Do the tendencies of the present day, mass movements, social organization, publicity, public education, emphasize the unique in man, or enhance the dominance of undifferentiated man acting as mass?

I have characterized education as a victory won over one's wish-fancies and childish egoism, as the lifting of the problems of life to higher and more significant dilemmas, as the attainment of mastery. A humanistic liberalism seeks freedom as broad-mindedness; it strives for a highly civilized, urbane and sophisticated state of mind in which insight is deepened and interest is widened.

For purposes of this discussion, propaganda is defined as the manipulation of the public to the end of securing some specific action.

When we think we are most free our opinions and our behavior are being skillfully manipulated by persons operating behind the scenes.

It is the place of liberal Christianity to state the supremacy of the everlasting ends of life over the means of living, of the believer over the thing believed, the man over the system, the worker over the product. We are not liberals because we believe less but because we believe more. We dare to believe without an infallible guarantee of the substance of our faith in a moral issue. It is not an historical opinion. Liberalism is not a new system of dogma, but a new point of view. ... The place of liberal Christianity is to restore to the moderm man his spiritual integrity.

Animal training may give one the means to make a living; liberal education gives living a meaning.

Education aims at independence of judgment. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.

The reader will, I think, soon discover that I have tried to affirm the processes of his mental development and ripening of personality---something quite independent both of the self-idolatries of the mass and of those primitive emotional fixations and stereotypes whose antiquated symbolisms linger on under the terminology of religion. If there is anything affirmative in the assertion of the meaning of spiritual maturity in the modern world, then I may hope that the effort of this book will be regarded as constructive.