Everett Dean Martin Quotes

Psychology is an attempt to gain a scientific understanding of human nature. We are all deeply interested in knowing human nature. When we are not talking about ourselves we are usually talking about our neighbors.

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.

Every government, our own included, fights with propaganda as deadly as poison gas.

Is learning a venture in spiritual freedom that is humanism, or is it a routine process of animal training?

It is children and savages and the illiterate who have the most implicit faith. It is said that unbelief is sin. This is not so; it is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt is often to take sides with fact against oneself. Nietzsche said that this is characteristic of "higher men."

It is in the localities where there is least artistic appreciation or intellectual curiosity or cosmopolitan spirit, the places where people have nothing with which to occupy their minds, that we find strongholds of "morality." Where education prevails, people learn to behave themselves as a matter of wisdom and good taste. Those who are sufficiently practiced in the art of living to be able to observe the common decencies without always "watching their step," may sometimes look up from the ground and take a broader view.

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?

…so long as the public may be manipulated by misrepresentation and by appeal to ignorance and prejudice, it is the public’s own fault if the “knowing ones” make use of questionable methods.

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 attainment of spirit today requires the very most uncompromisingly critical analysis and revaluation of ideals and enthusiasms, ancient and modern, of which the awakening modern mind is capable.

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

Whoever is concerned about his education should be on his guard against propaganda.

One reason why people cherish the delusion that they are still free long after they have lost or destroyed the liberties won by their ancestors lies in the boundless vanity of man when acting as mass. The mass in modern times believes it is sovereign. As sovereign it is free.

…prejudice and the well-known weaknesses of human nature are to be exploited and thus encouraged.

In just the measure that education aims to develop the individual with independence of judgment rather than to indoctrinate him with tradition and custom and official dogma, to that degree it separates him from the mass and is successful insofar as it emancipates his mind from the tyranny of herd opinion.