We had visions in those days, a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. And now all those young men are old men, if they're alive at all, and their visions are no more than dreams, and the old days are forgotten. We fly forgotten as a dream, as it says in the old hymn, and our dreams are forgotten long before we are.
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Marilynne Robinson on Ideological Thinking
The willingness to indulge in ideological thinking — that is, in thinking that is by definition not one's own, which is blind to experience and to the contradictions that arise when broader fields of knowledge are consulted — is a capitulation no one should ever make. It is a betrayal of our magnificent minds and of all the splendid resources our culture has prepared for their use.