Everett Dean Martin: Trending quotes

“It must be borne in mind that everything the propagandist does or says is for effect—most commonly the effect on fools. The public wants not truth but a show?”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 144

Truth , Fools

“Standardization develops a kind of mass mind, which in mature years renders men very susceptible to crowd appeal.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 74

Men

“What the state desires of education is soldiers, reliable voters, law-abiding citizens, contented working men, prosperous traders. Hence a spirit of docility and credulity, often of timidity, prevails in the school.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 74

Men , Education , School , Law

“It will hardly be denied that a revolution, whatever else it may be, is a phenomenon of the crowd. I have endeavored to approach the historical survey of revolutionary movements from the standpoint of social psychology.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Farewell to Revolution (1935), p. x, Foreword

“There is a quality of the educated mind which may best be described as a kind of sincerity, and conversely the outstanding trait of ignorance is that of clever insincerity.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 43

Education , Sincerity

“Education is emancipation from herd opinion, self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and urbanity.”

Everett Dean Martin

Preface p. vii
The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926)

Education

“Education aims at independence of judgment. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145

Education

“It is impossible to understand the American public without taking into account the tremendous psychological effect of bringing up a generation of people in a daily environment of advertising. It is impossible to escape the advertising man; his sales talk assaults us in the morning newspaper, in the street car, with billboards along the highways, and in his shameless use of the radio. This means that from morning till night, in the midst of our work as in our recreation, we live constantly in an atmosphere of intellectual shoddiness. Every popular prejudice and vulgar conceit is played upon and pandered to in the interests of salesmanship. Everywhere material interests and herd opinion are strengthened to the loss of personal independence. The tendency is to think and speak for effect rather than out of one's inner life. There is a marked decline the ability to play with ideas, or to live the spiritual life for its own sake. Hence a decline in civilization of interest, humor and urbanity. Advertising tends to make mechanized barbarians of us all.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), pp. 29-30

Life , People , Cars , Idea

“Seek education for yourself and it is the search for the good life. From ancient times men have sought knowledge that they might become better judges of good and evil.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 180

Life , Men , Education , Search

“It is the place of liberal Christianity to state the supremacy of the everlasting ends of life over the means of living, of the believer over the thing believed, the man over the system, the worker over the product. We are not liberals because we believe less but because we believe more. We dare to believe without an infallible guarantee of the substance of our faith in a moral issue. It is not an historical opinion. Liberalism is not a new system of dogma, but a new point of view. … The place of liberal Christianity is to restore to the moderm man his spiritual integrity.”

Everett Dean Martin

"New Pastor in Initial Sermon," The Register and Leader (Des Moines), January 16, 1911, p. 5

Life , Faith

“Moral education is not mere drill in the ways of the herd. The good man's first duty, as Professor Erskine says, is to be intelligent. Good intentions alone do not enable man to judge wisely or behave well. The prevailing idea that one can be at the same time good and stupid has strongly influenced our education.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 180

Stupidity , Education , Way , Intelligence

“One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 145

Education , Thinking

“When we think we are most free our opinions and our behavior are being skillfully manipulated by persons operating behind the scenes.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 29

Behavior , Thinking , Personality

“The crowd is a social phenomenon only in the sense that it affects a number of persons at the same time.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Behavior of Crowds (1920), p. 7

Sense , Time , Personality

“Education is training in wisdom and virtue, and the exercise of these is freedom.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 219

Wisdom , Education , Exercises , Freedom

“The skepticism which has value is that which leads one on to further study and investigation. And it is characterized by intellectual modesty.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 91

Study

“By the term individual I shall mean that in which each of us is peculiarly himself. I shall emphasize not what is common is us, but what is uncommon, and this leads me to a restatement of our question. In considering what is happening to the individual, I shall discuss what in modern civilization is happening to the uncommon in us. Are we becoming more common or more uncommon? Are the common people destroying the uncommon? Is the public self of us crushing out the personal self? Are we being directed more from without than from within? As our group memberships grow larger, do we as persons tend to grow smaller? Do the tendencies of the present day, mass movements, social organization, publicity, public education, emphasize the unique in man, or enhance the dominance of undifferentiated man acting as mass?”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 9

People , Education , Question , Personality

“The so-called natural sentiments of the average man are mostly the inherited prejudices of the once suppressed classes. The emphasis upon natural goodness is, psychologically speaking, unwillingness to submit such prejudices to wholesome self-criticism. Hence the democratic government tends to support each crowd in its delusion of infallibility. The crowd rationalizes its will to rule in terms of narrow and parochial ideas of righteousness and seeks to force conformity to such ideas upon all. The imagined vindication of the common man's notions of goodness is regarded as the ultimate triumph of righteousness. Hence democracy has always manifested a certain crusading spirit, and the democratic Utopia is envisaged as a sort of Roman peace with "righteousness" established by force rather than assent.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 22

Peace , Democracy , Imagination , Idea

“Common men cherish their naive faiths and ask no questions.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 85

Men , Faith , Question

“Crowd mentality is a kind of simultaneous psychosis which may take possession of any group.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Farewell to Revolution (1935), p. xi, Foreword