Aging & Wisdom Quote by Heywood Broun

Broun’s line is a rebuke disguised as a warning: the real danger isn’t corrupting books, it’s the protective vacuum adults try to wrap around children. Coming from a journalist who spent his career watching public opinion get manufactured, the sentence reads like a shot across the bow at censorship campaigns and “decency” panics. He flips the expected villain. Instead of blaming novels for tempting the “young and pure in heart,” he indicts the gatekeepers who keep shelves tidy by keeping them thin.

The intent is strategic. Broun is defending reading not as a polite hobby but as a kind of immunization. Bad ideas don’t become less potent because you’ve never met them; they become more seductive, more mythic, more likely to arrive unchallenged through rumor, propaganda, or the loudest voice in the room. “What they don’t read” is a whole curriculum of missing contradictions: stories that expand sympathy, histories that complicate patriotism, arguments that teach you to spot a con.

The subtext is also a critique of innocence as a political project. “Pure in heart” sounds tender, but Broun treats purity as a vulnerability, even a commodity: something institutions promise to preserve while quietly shaping what counts as acceptable knowledge. The line works because it turns absence into action. Not-reading isn’t neutral; it’s engineered. In an era of mass newspapers, moral guardians, and rising ideological battles, Broun is warning that the most efficient way to control a young person isn’t to hand them dangerous books. It’s to make sure they never learn how to read danger at all.