Skip to content

A cultural delusion is widespread in the twentieth century. The extraordinary progress in science and technology that we have achieved in this century has deluded many of our contemporaries into thinking that similar progress obtains in other fields of mental activity. They unquestioningly think that the twentieth century is superior to its predecessors in all the efforts of the human mind.

— Mortimer Adler The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (1992)

Another quote →

Topics

Progress

More quotes by Mortimer Adler

Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

How to Read a Book (1940)

Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue.

Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990)

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

The Leisure alternatives catalog: food for mind & body (1979)

An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.

Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education Beyond Schooling (1977)

It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.

Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990)

All Mortimer Adler quotes →

You may also like

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The History of Electricity is a field full of pleasing objects, according to all the genuine and universal principles of taste, deduced from a knowledge of human nature.

Joseph Priestley The History and Present State of Electricity (1767)

Just remember, you can do anything you set your mind to, but it takes action, perseverance, and facing your fears.

Gillian Anderson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Mortimer Adler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.