Mike

“So when the orator is more convincing than the doctor, what happens is that an ignorant person is more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience.”
― Plato, Gorgias

“The business of voting your conscience is: Do you really care just about how you feel? or, Do you care about what happens to the world? If you care about what you feel you don't have any conscience, you're not a moral agent at all, so stop talking about conscience, you don't have any.”
― Noam Chomsky, Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

“In her book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby mercilessly lampoons the very American notion that, because there are two sides to every question, both deserve respect and both must, in some way, be true. The Gut tells us that this is only fair, and we are a fair people, after all. All one has to do is muster an argument with enough vigor, package it well, and get enough people to buy both the idea and the product through which it is expressed. The more people buy, the more correct you are. The barriers that once forced American cranks to adapt or withdraw- or even merely to defend- their ideas all have fallen. It is considered impolite to raise them again, almost un-American, since we are all entitled to our opinion.”
― Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

“And the same will be true of the orator and the oratory in relation to all other arts. The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about thongs; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of persuading the ignorant that he seems to know more than the experts.”
― Plato, Gorgias