Daily Inspiration Quote by Leo Rosten

Rosten’s line is a neat little trap: it pretends to be about “communication,” that bland civic virtue everyone claims to want, then flips it into a diagnosis of power. The scare quotes do the heavy lifting. “Communication” isn’t neutral exchange here; it’s a euphemism extremists deploy to sound reasonable while demanding submission. He’s skewering the rhetorical move where someone frames dissent as a failure of dialogue rather than a clash of values. If you don’t “communicate” with me, you’re close-minded; if you do, the only acceptable endpoint is my victory.

The subtext is that extremism isn’t defined only by intensity of belief but by a corrupted idea of reciprocity. Real communication requires the risk of being changed by what you hear. The extremist treats conversation as a compliance test: agreement is proof you’re “listening,” disagreement is evidence you’re dishonest, brainwashed, or acting in bad faith. That’s why the term “extremists” matters more than any specific ideology; Rosten is pointing to a behavioral pattern across factions, eras, and causes.

Contextually, Rosten lived through the 20th century’s propaganda machinery and ideological sorting, when “dialogue” could be weaponized as image management. The line anticipates today’s debate culture, where calls for “just have a conversation” often function as a demand to platform certainty. It works because it exposes a social fraud: the performance of openness used to foreclose it.