“In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.” — Kurt Andersen Cult Copy Share Image
“If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it… — Kurt Andersen Truth Copy Share Image
“In 1848 the Homeopathic Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, eventually becoming the Drexel University College of Medicine. Homeopathic M.D. degrees were… — Kurt Andersen Doctor Copy Share Image
“Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —PHILIP K. DICK” — Kurt Andersen Realities Copy Share Image
“Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania… — Kurt Andersen Irrational Copy Share Image
“Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many… — Kurt Andersen America Copy Share Image
I am proud to be American. We wouldn't have our big dreams without this quality, but if we can't agree on the… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism… — Kurt Andersen Printing press Copy Share Image
“The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay… — Kurt Andersen Colony Copy Share Image
“the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,”… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“The Beats’ self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps… — Kurt Andersen Lineage Copy Share Image
Because we don't know that much about what has happened before, it's useful. But either we will recover and progress, or the… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to… — Kurt Andersen Faith Copy Share Image
“Let me quote once more from Tolkien’s lecture, which he delivered a few months before the fantasy-besotted Nazis started World War II.… — Kurt Andersen Fantasy Copy Share Image
“The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized… — Kurt Andersen Communication Copy Share Image
“J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. “Fantasy,” he said in 1939, talking… — Kurt Andersen Fantasy Copy Share Image
“YOU KNOW HOW young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it?… — Kurt Andersen Change Copy Share Image
“Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across… — Kurt Andersen Change Copy Share Image
“The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities… — Kurt Andersen Computers Copy Share Image
“it was the sudden, shocking exposure of actual conspiracies starting in the 1970s that made Americans overcorrect, to assume that anything bad… — Kurt Andersen Conspiracies Copy Share Image
“Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S.… — Kurt Andersen Climate change Copy Share Image
“It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative… — Kurt Andersen Freedom Copy Share Image
“The great compromise between the American religious impulse and the American Enlightenment in the 1700s permitted any and every conceivable sect to… — Kurt Andersen Enlightenment Copy Share Image
“And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the… — Kurt Andersen Psychology Copy Share Image
“The antisharia movement lobbied states to pass statutes and constitutional amendments banning the use of sharia in their courts and legal systems,… — Kurt Andersen Israel Copy Share Image
Maybe the reality-based fractions of red and blue America are reaching a sort of consensus: Just as Republicans are beginning to get… — Kurt Andersen America Copy Share Image
“The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the… — Kurt Andersen Brave new world Copy Share Image
“Modern electronic mass media had been a defining piece of the twentieth-century experience that served an important democratic function—presenting Americans with a… — Kurt Andersen Mass media Copy Share Image
“Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God’s orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and… — Kurt Andersen War Copy Share Image
“mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries;… — Kurt Andersen Business Copy Share Image
“We can argue all we want about how different guns were in the 1790s, when it took a minute to fire three… — Kurt Andersen Amendment Copy Share Image
“With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions… — Kurt Andersen Freedom Copy Share Image
“The new king of the Protestant Establishment, featured on the cover of Time, was Reinhold Niebuhr, a New Yorker and bona-fide intellectual… — Kurt Andersen Eternal life Copy Share Image
“Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a… — Kurt Andersen Protestantism Copy Share Image
“IN 1967 YOUNG Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing… — Kurt Andersen Fiction and reality Copy Share Image
“P. T. Barnum was the great early American merchandiser of exciting secular fantasies and half-truths. His extremely successful precircus career derived from… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
“If underground militant cells were setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks around the country these days, of course, America would… — Kurt Andersen Martial law Copy Share Image
If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones… — Kurt Andersen Copy Share Image
