Minds Wide Shut Quotes

“If one has ever wondered how an entire nation could have followed a murderous leader, one needs to understand that it doesn't take that many people actually believing what the leader says. They just need to be willing to repeat whatever their side is saying.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

“In our classes, we have seen students who adopt fundamentalist ways of thinking almost by default; not as a choice, but because they imagine that is just what thinking is. These students seem genuinely surprised that there re situations where one cannot find a uniquely correct answer, where one needs to make choices under uncertainty, and where those who recommend a different course of action might turn out to be right. By showing what other ways of thinking there might be, we have at least encouraged some of them, even if they remain fundamentalists, to be so more reflectively, precisely because what had been automatic has become a choice.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

“If extreme positions are the only options, disagreements become unresolvable. In a democracy, one needs to compromise, which means not everything can be a matter of principal allowing no middle way, as is all too often the case today. The same may be true of addressing too many issues as matters of fundamental rights. When issues are matters of principles or fundamental rights, those who disagree are simply evil, and people are driven from extreme to greater extreme. Moderates will be call unprincipled (or worse), so the dynamic, once underway, becomes almost irresistible. Call it the vicious circle of noble principles: once ensnared in this circle, society becomes hopelessly riven, and the preconditions of a democratic polity are lost.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

“Unanimity testifies to thoughtlessness, because in politics there are always arguments on both sides... political judgement should not be reflexive but deliberative.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

“This is what we call political fundamentalism: a vision of the political world in which all goodness and truth lie on one side.”
― Gary Saul Morson, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us