Quote

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

Max Lerner

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Max Lerner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1902
Born: December 20
Died: 1992
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Мінск
Action
Blindness
Every
Seeks
Men
Collectives
Collective
Frightened
League
Ignorance
Bewilderment
Civilization
Reassurance

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In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
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The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.
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It is almost as easy to be enervated by triumph as by defeat.
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Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.
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The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
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There is a hate layer of opinion and emotion in America. There will be other McCarthys to come who will be hailed as its heroes.
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A people's speech is the skin of its culture.
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Every step by which men add to their knowledge and skills is a step also by which they can control other men.
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To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
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Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.
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The Russians train they do not dare educate.
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We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
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What counted was not the facts but the fears.
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American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.
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The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
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There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.
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A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician
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I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.
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Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.
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America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.
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