Home > Work > The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas
1 " Hence the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek's is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey's was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue: "We're All Individuals! "
― Jonah Goldberg , The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas
2 " social gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch proclaimed that if God couldn’t be a liberal progressive then we needed a new god entirely. "
3 " Often, what we think are the facts of the past are in reality simply reflections of what we want to believe about the present. "
4 " Despite the fact that the New Deal was a failure, it remains the gold standard in liberal policy making. "
5 " Taken on its own terms, pragmatism’s folly is that it separates intelligence from wisdom. Its greatest sins are arrogance and deceit, including self-deceit. It is arrogant because it assumes the individual—particularly the expert—can know everything he needs to know without reference to received wisdom, "
6 " Hayek, more than anyone else, illuminated the knowledge problem. Simply put: No one person can ever know enough. Planners who think they can process all of the data from disparate sources across vast expanses of geography and culture are, quite simply, educated fools. "
7 " whenever liberalism goes off the tracks and turns into something bad or despotic, it’s because real liberals have abandoned the project. The "
8 " That’s why liberals are constantly discovering new crises that require more government solutions. "
9 " There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. Here "
10 " Head Start, among the holiest of social programs, has never worked, and each time this unwelcome fact presents itself it is greeted as proof that the program simply requires more money. "
11 " Doctors make no such exceptions to the Hippocratic Oath—save, of course, when it comes to abortion—and only then when another dogmatic obsession trumps their oath. Alas, "