Cynthia Ozick Quotes

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

And everything is controlled and everybody is a member of some committee, because then their watchdogs placed in the committees can control everything, what this person says or how this person think(s), you know.

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.

The core problem in our society is political correctness.

We're led to believe everybody opposes it and disagrees with political correctness, but yet everybody's scared to death of it. So who is it? Well, it's the power structure wherever you happen to be.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

The more bans you have in a society, the more you will have radical elements.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

Public discourse degenerated. There's no longer a place for intelligent debate at universities, where people just work for degrees and careers. My own experience was how my trade union's lively branch debates dwindled to a few people round cups of coffee. There's a climate of people frightened to say what they think for fear of offending someone.

Folks will always, always, always go back to the comfortable status quo, with its silent voices and lack of conflict, if you give them the chance.

When people understand that they are constantly monitored, they are more conformist - they are less willing to take up controversial positions - and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.