JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

Our goal, simply stated, is to be the best.

Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.

We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.

There are pastors who won't go to people's sick beds. How can people of God turn their back on the sick, poor and hungry?

Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.

Curiosity is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing.

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.

Nothing could be less intelligent than to assume, as many respectable persons still manage to do, that the forms of agitation which are popularly summed up in the terms socialism, anarchism, feminism, and pacifism are mere eccentricities of unbalanced minds, seeking to cloak their hatred of restraint and their cowardice under theories of social regeneration.

If one seeks to disseminate his ideas by means of periodicals or pamphlets, the post-office officials may decline to transmit anything that does not suit their taste; and the courts have decided that the United States post-office has precisely the same right to refuse to carry The Masses that it has to exclude sulfuric acid and dynamite from the mails.

We have denounced the stupidities of the British censors and lamented the cutting off of our supply of German newspapers, even of scientific periodicals; and why, we asked, need any one get so heated by the words of a gentle philosopher like Bertrand Russell? And, now that we are actually in the war, these same things which we deprecated in the policy of European countries have become our policy.

To become historically-minded is to be grown-up.

Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.

History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.

I am opposed to censorship. Censors are pretty sure fools. I have no confidence in the suppression of everyday facts.

Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of misapprehension or error.

We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves.

Speech gave man a unique power to lead a double life, he could say one thing and do another.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened.

Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions.

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

Mere lack of success does not discredit a method, for there are many things that determine and perpetuate our sanctified ways of doing things besides their success in reaching their proposed ends.

We continue to think of new things in old ways.