"Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route"
About this Quote
An “open mind” gets sold as the highest civic virtue, but Kenny skewers the brand-new, showroom-shiny version: openness so frictionless that nothing ever sticks. The line lands because it flips a compliment into an indictment. Truth doesn’t get rejected; it’s politely received, waved through, and escorted out the back door. The joke is architectural - an intellectual body with a front entrance and a “ready exit,” designed for airflow, not storage. That’s not curiosity; it’s draft.
Kenny’s subtext is about performative receptivity: the kind of person who can say they’re listening while ensuring they’re never altered by what they hear. “Pausing anywhere along the route” is the dagger. She’s not attacking ignorance; she’s attacking the refusal to metabolize information, to let it slow you down, complicate you, cost you. The best defenses against truth aren’t always walls. Sometimes they’re wide-open doors.
Context matters because Kenny wasn’t a salon moralist. She was a nurse and medical innovator who fought entrenched orthodoxies around polio treatment, often against hostile institutions and reputations that mattered more than outcomes. That experience sharpens the quote’s cynicism: she likely met plenty of “open-minded” authorities who entertained her evidence as a courtesy and then returned to the comfort of consensus. The line is a warning about how power maintains itself - not by refusing new ideas outright, but by hosting them briefly, the way committees “consider” proposals they’ve already decided to ignore.
Kenny’s subtext is about performative receptivity: the kind of person who can say they’re listening while ensuring they’re never altered by what they hear. “Pausing anywhere along the route” is the dagger. She’s not attacking ignorance; she’s attacking the refusal to metabolize information, to let it slow you down, complicate you, cost you. The best defenses against truth aren’t always walls. Sometimes they’re wide-open doors.
Context matters because Kenny wasn’t a salon moralist. She was a nurse and medical innovator who fought entrenched orthodoxies around polio treatment, often against hostile institutions and reputations that mattered more than outcomes. That experience sharpens the quote’s cynicism: she likely met plenty of “open-minded” authorities who entertained her evidence as a courtesy and then returned to the comfort of consensus. The line is a warning about how power maintains itself - not by refusing new ideas outright, but by hosting them briefly, the way committees “consider” proposals they’ve already decided to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
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