Theodore Gericault Quotes

I do sometimes feel like I function within an echo chamber and I'm just kind of preaching to the choir.

Bastions of free-flowing discussion with civil exchange are the academic ideal. But during my time in academia, it became increasingly clear that prisons of political correctness with peer-engendered public shaming are now the academic reality.

One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.

May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

If obedience is the result of the instinct of the masses, revolt is the result of their thought.

If the majority holds some thing of value, you can be certain it has none.

Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.

There is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.

On social media there's this thing where on many occasions, there's a single proscribed way of acting. Like if somebody dies, everyone has to say "R.I.P.! R.I.P.!" Basically they're saying, "Don't hurt me, I'm a good person."

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.

What makes this mentality dangerous is that when the team is held together by careerism and mindless partisanship, individual members are punished for thinking for themselves.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

It is easier going out of the way when we are in, than going in when we are out.

Never follow a follower who is following someone who has fallen. Its why the whole world is falling apart.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.

The more defensive a society, the more conformist.

The expression "following suit" is a curious one, because it has nothing to do with walking behind a matching set of clothing. If you follow suit, it means you do the same thing somebody else has just done. If all of your friends decided to jump off a bridge into the icy waters of an ocean or river, for instance, and you jumped in right after them, you would be following suit. You can see why following suit can be a dangerous thing to do, because you could end up drowning simply because somebody else thought of it first.