A Quote by C. S. Lewis

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

C. S. Lewis

Quote Topics

Argued Assumed Being Dangerous Dangerous Ideas Ideas Most Society

Quote Author

C. S. Lewis
British - Writer
November 29, 1898 - November 22, 1963

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Book CoverTo have people who are well informed but not constrained by conscience is conceivably, the most dangerous outcome of education possible. Indeed it could be argued that ignorance is better than unguided intelligence, for the most dangerous people are those who have knowledge without a moral framework.

Ernest L. Boyer

The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.

Jacob M. Appel

What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man; and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies.

Raymond Williams

Killing for ideas is the most dangerous form of killing at all. Being willing to die for your ideas rather than your country is another concept, but dying for an idea, like in religion, is absurd.

Mick Jagger

Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.

William O. Douglas

As a society, we pick words that are offensive based on what we're most afraid of. We associate sounds with some dangerous idea, and right now the most dangerous thing to us are the differences between us.

Richard Dooling

It can be fairly argued that the highest priority for mankind is to save itself from extinction. However, it can also be argued th at a society that neglects its children and robs them of their human potential can extinguish itself without an external enemy.

Selma Fraiberg

Our religious police has the most dangerous effect on society - the segregation of genders, putting the wrong ideas in the heads of men and women, producing psychological diseases that never existed in our country before, like fanatacism.

Basmah bint Saud

Only weeks after Oslo began, when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace, I argued that a Palestinian society not constrained by democratic norms would be a fear society that would pose a grave threat to Israel.

Natan Sharansky

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.

Lawrence Lessig

Young black men are not only being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are also being targeted by the police, harassed by security forces, and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous.

Henry Giroux

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.

Carl Bernstein

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.

William Sloane Coffin

Being able to chuck ideas around and bounce ideas off each other with anyone I'm working with is just something I love to do, that's how most of these ideas are formed.