Ken

“The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors—the leaders of our society, in short—are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

“In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force,” Jefferson wrote in an 1824 letter, “the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.”
― C. Bradley Thompson, America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It

“This mode of thinking makes the justification of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, but of their usefulness; and flatters itself by that means to escape the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions.”
― Jonathan Haidt, All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech

“These innumerable seekers of safety first, and last, who take no risk either of suffering in a good cause or of scandal in a bad one, are here manifestly, nakedly, that which they were in life, the waste and rubbish of the universe, of no account to the world, unfit for Heaven and barely admitted to Hell. They have no need to die, for they ‘never were alive’.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno