4 Philip Wylie Quotes on Politics

Philip Wylie quotes on politics

6. Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression.

11. Both constructs of the aphorism hold true. But, because it is an American convention to adore common people without restriction, I elect here to criticize them, as a lesson. A society which cannot criticize its masses is hamstrung-as ours is. For it is our American common people, and not the highly educated ones, who have chucked overboard the critical method and thereby cut loose the ship of state from its sounding machinery, its rudder, its glass, and its keel, leaving the whole business to drift where the blather of common men blows it.

12. Love of liberty is laudable and logically the chief political end of man, so long as it is hitched to responsibleness. Eighteenth century man, politically educated and understanding the major implications of what was going on in his environment, made a fairly responsible voter. Today, common man insists on his right to vote and insists, equally, on the right not to have to know what he is voting about. This folly is pitching all common men rapidly toward the rocks. The current war is a mere reef we are now grating over. What lies beyond may be the greater disaster.

15. Our Protestant churches, and, even more especially, the Catholic Church, devote an incredible portion of their political energy-perhaps most of it-to interference with the sex mores of the great non-Protestant and non-Catholic minority. Such religious enterprises are therefore essentially fascistic and in no way democratic. But it is a fact that no law which runs counter to the exact letter of medieval Catholic dogma can be passed in any of our states, and if a sensible law infringes on the archaic attitudes of Protestantism, it cannot be offered in a state legislature.