Mitchell

“And as excellent as our cognitive systems are, in the modern world we must know when to discount them and turn our reasoning over to instruments—the tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking that extend our powers of reason beyond what nature gave us. Because in the twenty-first century, when we think by the seat of our pants, every correction can make things worse, and can send our democracy into a graveyard spiral.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“In an age when most major public-policy challenges revolve around science, fewer than 1 percent of US congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“When the citizens of a dominant culture come to believe that the end is near for their way of life, they search for scapegoats—especially if they suspect that they themselves have been the agents of their own cultural decline. Unwilling to look in a mirror, unable to confront their own habits and tastes, these citizens choose to believe that the world they knew has been ripped away from them by stealth and subterfuge. The most insecure and frightened among them will also reach what they think is an obvious conclusion: that democracy, and especially liberal democracy, was the instrument of their culture’s destruction, and so to find salvation and assure their own survival, they must therefore reject democracy.”
― Thomas M. Nichols, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy

“Instead, the threat to democracy now in America and elsewhere comes from the working and middle classes—the people among whom I was born and raised—whose rage comes overwhelmingly from cultural insecurity, inflated expectations, tribal partisan alliances, obsessions about ethnicity and identity, blunted ambition, and a childlike understanding of the limits of government.”
― Thomas M. Nichols, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy