Everett Dean Martin: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Moral training which does not encourage critical examination of popular ideas of what is right and good, does not tend to make men better, but only of one mind.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 183

Men , Idea , Training

“Governments and churches and ruling classes and commercial groups have always sought to get their hands on the institutions for the education of youth and utilize them for their own interests.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 46

Youth , Education

“For purposes of this discussion, propaganda is defined as the manipulation of the public to the end of securing some specific action.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), p. 142

“It is in the localities where there is least artistic appreciation or intellectual curiosity or cosmopolitan spirit, the places where people have nothing with which to occupy their minds, that we find strongholds of "morality." Where education prevails, people learn to behave themselves as a matter of wisdom and good taste. Those who are sufficiently practiced in the art of living to be able to observe the common decencies without always "watching their step," may sometimes look up from the ground and take a broader view.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 181

Wisdom , People , Education , Art

“The reader will, I think, soon discover that I have tried to affirm the processes of his mental development and ripening of personality---something quite independent both of the self-idolatries of the mass and of those primitive emotional fixations and stereotypes whose antiquated symbolisms linger on under the terminology of religion. If there is anything affirmative in the assertion of the meaning of spiritual maturity in the modern world, then I may hope that the effort of this book will be regarded as constructive.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Civilizing Ourselves: Intellectual Maturity in the Modern World (1932), p. xi, Foreword

Books , World , Religion , Hope

“Education has to do with insight, with valuing, with understanding, with the development of the power of discrimination, the ability to make choice amongst the possibilities of experience and to think and act in ways that distinguish men from animals and higher men from lower.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 42

Men , Education , Way , Understanding

“Probably the greatest difference among men is this difference in habits of thought. There are some minds which behave merely like the mechanic who having learned his trade in a certain way never can function in any other.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Psychology: What it has to Teach You about Yourself and Your World (1924), p. 83

Men , Way , Learning

“The greater the industrial and political organization, the greater is the emphasis on the individual as a mere mass unit, and the smaller his importance as a single separate person.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 27

Personality

“The propagandist merely wishes you to think as he does. The educator is more modest; he is so delighted if you think at all that he is willing to let you do so in your own way.”

Everett Dean Martin

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

Education , Way , Thinking

“The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind.”

Everett Dean Martin

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

People , Education , Thinking

“In just the measure that education aims to develop the individual with independence of judgment rather than to indoctrinate him with tradition and custom and official dogma, to that degree it separates him from the mass and is successful insofar as it emancipates his mind from the tyranny of herd opinion.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 17

Education , Success

“It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself.”

Everett Dean Martin

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

Nature

“I use the term "liberal" not in the political sense, as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense meaning by a liberal education the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests.”

Everett Dean Martin

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

Education , Sense

“Psycho-pathologists very often have to deal with people whose thinking is thus “compulsive.” And when analysis is possible, it is usually found that such persistent ideas are associated with some unconscious impulse. It is characteristic of all compulsive thinking that it is not the outgrowth of conscious reasoning and cannot be modified by evidence. Persons whose thinking is compulsive often seek to “rationalize” it—that is, they resort to ingenious devices to render it plausible or to explain away that which would contradict it. This sort of thinking, as I have tried to show, is a common characteristic of the crowd mind. The thinking of the crowd is dogmatic as a result of causes which are similar to those which render compulsive that of certain neurotics. And dogma is a common element in religion.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Mystery of Religion (1924), pp. 52-53

People , Religion , Idea , Thinking

“The student of social psychology … is concerned not so much with the panaceas that may be proposed for the solution of the economic problems, but is interested rather in the possibility that under any economic system a maximum number of people should be able to grow from infantile tribal ways to self-directing maturity.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), p. 5

People , Way , Problem

“Whoever is concerned about his education should be on his guard against propaganda.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 45

Education

“…prejudice and the well-known weaknesses of human nature are to be exploited and thus encouraged.”

Everett Dean Martin

Source: Are We Victims of Propaganda, Our Invisible Masters: A Debate with Edward Bernays (1929), pp. 143-144

Nature

“…education is a spiritual revaluation of human life. Its task is to reorient the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals. If education is not liberalizing, it is not education in the sense of the title of this book.”

Everett Dean Martin

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

Life , Books , Education , Sense