“The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust... Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today. The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change.”
![“To make a contented slave,’ [Frederick] Bailey later wrote, ‘it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.’ This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think…” quote by Carl Sagan](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/9e0/carl-sagan-160_critical-thinking_to-make-a-contented-slave-frederick-bail_1690816.jpg)
