When Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and his black colleague Marvin Stewart were invited by the College Republicans to speak at Columbia last year, the tolerant, free-speech-loving Columbia students violently attacked them, shutting down the speech.
The best way to get your audience larger and more consistent is to be more divisive and more radical and criticize those who cater to or kowtow to other forces.
It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.
One man's gospel truth is another man's blasphemous lie. The dangerous thing about people is the way we'll try to kill anyone whose truth doesn't agree with ours.
The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.
For 'Boxers and Saints', the tension between Eastern and Western ways of thinking was very personal for me, and I needed to control every aspect.
In some ways the fact that you are sometimes confronted with people who have such an opposite view to you on certain issues in many ways reinforces that identity that you have.
Every creed is a rock in running water: humanity sweeps by it. Every creed cries to the universe, "Halt!" A creed is the ignorant Past bulling the enlightened Present.
Wars of opinion, as they have been the most destructive, are also the most disgraceful of conflicts.
It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.
It was a remarkable relationship. Margaret [Thatcher] and I had a love/hate relationship. She was always defending the South African regime and we had some terrible fights, including an enormous one in Canada.
In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.
Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic .
