Spiro Agnew Quotes

Some of our newspapers and magazines are more concerned with the welfare of their advertisers than they are with the dissemination of news and the discussion of matters of lasting importance. ...Radio, television, motion pictures, popular books - all contribute...to...the stifling of dissent on all but the most banal levels. ...a renunciation of the most basic and precious of democratic principles.

Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.

The world has progressed to the point where it's most powerful force is public opinion. And I believe that in this world it is not the great book or epic play, as once was the case, that will shape that opinion, but those who understand mass media and the techniques of mass persuasion...We must not just believe in what we sell. We must sell what we believe in. And we must pour a vast energy into those causes.

I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

Education is power, it changes your whole life, it can create a life for yourself. So the more educated you are, the more you learn about what you care about, you become a more caring person. And if you can speak about what you care about to a person you disagree with, without denigrating or insulting them, then you may actually be heard. And you may even change their mind, or they may change yours.

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion.

In this day and age, there's just so much that can hyperstimulate us, and curiously, it is not satisfying us.

Each time I have the urge in me to make a statement or send a message or to issue a manifesto, I don't bother to write a novel. I write an article and publish it in a popular newspaper, or I make a television appearance. I would not waste five years of my life in order to send to the Israeli readers a simple message such as, "Let us change a policy or stop the settlements," Or, "Let us strive for peace." This is not what it is about.

Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.

I'm guessing whatever 'ways' you have in mind aren't Jill-appropriate either." "Put your books away and I'll show you.

I might have to consider coaching- I'm getting too old to be a world class runner and my mind isn't gone enough to become an official.

The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.

When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks. When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings. The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn't stop people from going on in the same way.

Books are necessary to correct the vices of the polite; but those vices are ever changing, and the antidote should be changed accordingly should still be new.

I can't expect people to decide that they will change with me, so I can see why I'm on the old side.

The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.

What you call types of mind are only mental ages.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

Great men stamp their mind upon their age and nation.

The religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so, but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while application of that power-in the improvement of the world.

Age doesn't matter. An open mind does.

In our current frame of mind, or paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, we like to think that marshalling government policy is the way to get things done.

A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.

One of the problems and the reason why Carolyn [Maloney ] wrote the book, the Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated is that some people think we have made it when we have not and there's much to be done.