Sublime

or as if he knew anything.

Charles Darwin once wrote: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic because it was not republican, but purely senatorial.

Behind Nixon’s bluster was, apparently, a cold calculation: if attempts to drive the bill through caused a southern Democratic filibuster, that filibuster would be a political boon to the GOP. Neither Knowland nor the Douglas Group seemed to understand—and if Nixon understood, he did not disclose what he understood—that the existence of sufficient

Johnson maintained his public posture of knowing nothing about the tactics being used. “As President, I don’t try to involve myself in the procedure of the Senate,” he said during a press conference in May. “I think Senator Mansfield and Senator Humphrey are much closer to the situation than I am. I am not trying to dodge you. I just don’t know.” A

In his 1922 opus, Public Opinion, Lippmann poses a straightforward question: Can citizens achieve a basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices about what to do? If the answer is no, then the entire democratic project is at best a folly.

common to assume that human progress affects everyone—that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized….But the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history….They know little if anything that is worth kno