public enlightenment Quotes

It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered, amongst the multitude! Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions may be propagated amongst the people. Diffusion, then, rather than discovery, is the duty of our government.

I have taken special interest in these accounts [of UFOs].. I think there may be substance to some of these reports... I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on this subject.

In order to encourage the free interchange of opinion and the enlightenment of the public, every Swedish subject shall have free access to official documents.

It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising the sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and a usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin. Let us, then, look to the great cause, and endeavor to preserve it in full force. Let us by all wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.

Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.

The general intelligence of the people is far ahead of our people, and no wonder; every night there are lectures upon every subject the mind of man can contemplate—astronomy, geology, botany, natural history, conchology, water, smoke, continents, mountains, valleys, clouds, anatomy, physiology, lice, spiders, whiskey, eatables, shipping, trees and everything. Elder Geda and I heard a Roman Catholic Priest lecture on botany with masterly ability this evening, yet not a cent was charged at the door; all these lectures are free to the public. I have told our young ministers for years, to learn to lecture; that our race will never be anything till they do so I am now satisfied, as never before, that I was right. These lectures are attended, too, not by the finely attired only, but by the laboring people.

I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.

Writers and reporters need to remind themselves they're not to be judged solely by the number of clicks or eyeballs on a given story, but there is this other value and this other important mission, and the key is balancing the two so that you stay alive long enough, whether you're an individual writer or whether you're a whole news organization, to keep doing what you're doing but that you don't get so driven by that that you forget that what you're supposed to be doing in a higher sense is informing people, is elevating the debate and not lowering it.

The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.

I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowlege among the people. no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.

It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.

In the networks' endless pursuit of controversy, we should ask what is the end value ... to enlighten or to profit? What is the end result ... to inform or to confuse? How does the ongoing exploration for more action, more excitements, more drama, serve our national search for internal peace and stability.

It is a good thing to write for the amusement of the public, but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction, their profit, their actual and tangible benefit.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.