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The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether to remain a conscious servant of falsehood (of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one’s family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies). Or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one’s children and contemporaries.
Live Not by Lies
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Since specialization is a way of coping with the inadequacies of the human mind, it should hardly be surprising that those with the vision of the anointed often view specialization negatively, or that their vocabulary often reflects that. Cosmic decisions require minds with cosmic scope—and to say that there are no such minds, that the human experience must be broken down into manageable-sized pieces, is to deny the vision of the anointed. Meanwhile, those with the tragic vision have often proclaimed the virtues of specialization. Adam Smith attributed much of economic progress to the “division of labor,” Edmund Burke said that he “revered” the specialist within his specialty, and Oliver Wendell Holmes said that specialists were more needed than generalists, whose presumptions he derided. But such views are the opposite of the views among the anointed.
The Vision of the Anointed
Thomas Sowell
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