Max Lerner Quotes

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.

Wink and shut their apprehensions up.

Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt.

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

Ignorance breeds fear.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness.

Every attempt to stop science has been characterized by darkness.

The bulk of mankind, even in those nations which are most celebrated for learning and wisdom, are still carried down the torrents of superstition, and entertain very unworthy apprehensions

Contemporary Americans were so prosperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.

Nothing in reality renders legitimate governments so insecure as extreme ignorance in the people. It is this which yields them an easy prey to seduction, makes them the victims of prejudices and false alarms, and so ferocious withal that their interference in a time of public commotion is more to be dreaded than the eruption of a volcano.

I worry that's what people are going to think about me if they kind of go backwards. But if that didn't happen to you, I'll feel better.

Fear's greatest weapon is its ability to blind one to anything. In its presence, we forget there are others to consider, things to save besides ourselves.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

Is it eradicating evil? Or are we like children, left alone in the house at night, who light candle after candle to keep away the darkness. We don't see that the darkness has a purpose — though we may not understand it — and so, in our terror, we end up burning down the house!

Mobs in their emotions are much like children, subject to the same tantrums and fits of fury.

I am the One, and I see all. But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot.

It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything.

The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.

The problem with people who say monsters don't really exist is that they're almost never saying it to the monsters." —Alice Healy

They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.