Reading for Survival Quotes

“The nonreader in our culture wants to believe. He is the “one born every minute”. The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him.”
― John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival

“The same idea was said in a different way by Eric Hoffer, the old dock-walloper, in his book years ago titled The True Believer. Hoffer's theory was that the best fanatics are people who have nothing in their heads but wind, smoke, and emptiness. Then if any idea manages to slip in there, it does not matter how insipid or grotesque that idea might be, it will expand to fill all the available emptiness, and it takes over the individual and all his actions. He cannot hear any voice but his own. He is beyond reason, beyond argumentation. He is right and everyone who does not believe exactly the same as he is wrong.”
― John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival

“These are our realities, and, like our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, if we--as a species rather than as an individual--are uninformed or careless, or indifferent to the Facts (emphasis mine), then survival as a species is in serious doubt." ~~John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival. c. 1987”
― John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival

“And I quote: "Here in America, as elsewhere, there will always be tremulous little people of dim intellect and hyperactive imagination, burning for explanations to all life's vicissitudes. They grow impatient with learned analyses of the present. They are defeated by histories that illuminate the past. No species of scholarship or analysis could ever satisfy them; for they need that Wondrous Explanation that will quiet all their fears, thrill them with villains to revile, and never tax their feeble powers of intellection.”
― John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival

“Take a quick look at terrorism. In Ireland, in Africa, in the Middle East. Most active terrorists are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. We keep making the automatic assumption that they know something of the world, of history, of politics, of geography. But that assumption is wrong. Totally wrong. They are manipulated by men who have the same thing in their heads that the kids have—nothing but hate, anger, machismo, a sense of fraternity, and access to explosives. Their world is just as tiny as Mog’s world. And as dangerous. They hunt their supposed enemies with the cleverness Mog hunted antelope, and care as much about the victims, about their terror and how they die.”
― John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival