"The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible"
About this Quote
Imagination gets sold as skepticism's cool cousin: the mind that invents new worlds should also see through old lies. Chase flips that flattering story. The line is a warning disguised as praise, insisting that the same mental elasticity that makes a person creatively powerful can also make them dangerously persuadable. If you can picture anything, you can rationalize anything.
The craft here is in the tight hinge between "imaginative" and "credulous". "Credulous" isn’t naive; it’s spiritually open in a way that can become intellectually reckless. Chase suggests a temperament that treats reality as negotiable. For such people, possibility isn’t a category, it’s a default setting. That’s why the clincher, "for them everything is possible", lands with a faint chill: it’s the motto of art, religion, conspiracy, romance, and propaganda, depending on who’s talking and what they want from you.
The subtext is about vulnerability. Imaginative minds often live half a step away from the obvious; they’re trained to connect dots other people don’t even see. That pattern-making gift is also a soft underbelly in an attention economy built to exploit narrative hunger. Give someone a story with enough symbolic satisfaction and they may choose it over the less cinematic truth.
Chase, writing in a 20th-century culture increasingly saturated with advertising, mass media, and political myth-making, sounds less like a scold than a realist: creativity expands the world, but it can also expand the list of things you’ll believe.
The craft here is in the tight hinge between "imaginative" and "credulous". "Credulous" isn’t naive; it’s spiritually open in a way that can become intellectually reckless. Chase suggests a temperament that treats reality as negotiable. For such people, possibility isn’t a category, it’s a default setting. That’s why the clincher, "for them everything is possible", lands with a faint chill: it’s the motto of art, religion, conspiracy, romance, and propaganda, depending on who’s talking and what they want from you.
The subtext is about vulnerability. Imaginative minds often live half a step away from the obvious; they’re trained to connect dots other people don’t even see. That pattern-making gift is also a soft underbelly in an attention economy built to exploit narrative hunger. Give someone a story with enough symbolic satisfaction and they may choose it over the less cinematic truth.
Chase, writing in a 20th-century culture increasingly saturated with advertising, mass media, and political myth-making, sounds less like a scold than a realist: creativity expands the world, but it can also expand the list of things you’ll believe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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