Daily Inspiration Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Cohen’s line has the dry snap of someone who loves ideas too much to trust them. Calling the targets of literature and philosophy “reigning idols” is a pointed demotion: what passes for reasoned argument or timeless art often rides on whatever a culture already worships. “Again” matters here. It suggests he’s repeating a hard-earned lesson against the recurring fantasy that thinking can be purely disinterested, floating above fashion, power, and collective desire.

The intent isn’t to sneer at literature or philosophy as mere propaganda; it’s to expose their operating conditions. Even the most rigorously argued system has to persuade, and persuasion depends on shared sacred objects: progress, Nature, God, the Nation, the Self, “science,” “authenticity.” Cohen’s “idols” frames these as socially manufactured absolutes that demand reverence while pretending not to. The subtext: if you want to understand a book or a theory, look less at its stated premises than at the unspoken reverences it flatters. What does it treat as untouchable? What does it make feel inevitable?

Contextually, Cohen is writing in a period when American pragmatism and logical analysis are pressuring grand metaphysical certainties, while mass politics and ideology are making idol-making visibly lethal. The line works because it’s compact and slightly corrosive: it drags the lofty reputations of “literature” and “philosophy” down into the crowded marketplace of belief. Not everything is an idol, but anything can become one once it starts “reigning.” The warning is methodological: critique the crown before you admire the crown-bearer.