Uncritical Adherence Quotes

Loyalty is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.

Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools.

To follow implies not only the denying of one's own clarity, investigation, integrity and honesty, but it also implies that your motive in following is reward.

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

I actually think that one of the most dangerous phenomena is the bowing to expertise, whether it's in international relations or how to use technologies.