Best 6 quotes of Harold Edmund Stearns on MyQuotes

Our morality system has become a mechanical device for protecting us against ourselves; it is the handiwork of terror.

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.

The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.

They seem to think that the terrific forces they had helped to unloose could be controlled (and composed), when it came to the making of peace, with a few kind words - that is, the mood of the world was going to change overnight from the long, strange, belligerent obscurantism to a clear, sweetly rational, cooperative spirit, without rancor, without revenge even in the hearts of the humiliated, without a memory of the months and months of life under the shadow of death.... Good-will, so they seemed to be saying, could be invoked by almost a wave of the hand....

What good are all these gadgets, if the life you live with them is mean and unimaginative?

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate?