Daily Inspiration Quote by A. Bartlett Giamatti

Giamatti takes aim at an appetite that looks innocent until you notice the wreckage it leaves behind: the craving for simplicity as a substitute for thinking. “Doctrine or decree” is a deft pairing. Doctrine flatters the believer with moral clarity; decree flatters the ruler with administrative speed. One offers certainty from above, the other certainty from within. Either way, the messy work of argument, evidence, and revision gets treated as a weakness.

The line “They are on the left and right” refuses the comforting story that intellectual coercion is an enemy tribe’s pathology. Giamatti is diagnosing a cross-partisan impulse: the urge to stop history, to foreclose debate, to turn politics (and education) into a loyalty test. By adding “not confined to a single part of the society,” he pushes beyond party labels to the institutions that manufacture easy answers: campuses and boardrooms, churches and newsrooms, bureaucracies and activist movements. The target isn’t conviction; it’s the conversion of conviction into a tool for silencing.

“Terrorists of the mind” is deliberately provocative, especially from an educator. He borrows the moral intensity of “terrorism” to describe a nonviolent but consequential harm: intimidation, conformity, the narrowing of permissible questions. The phrase also reframes “terror” as something that can be administered politely - through policies, orthodoxies, and social pressure - rather than bombs.

Context matters: Giamatti, a humanist academic who later led Yale, lived through the late Cold War’s culture wars and the churn of post-1960s polarization. His warning is institutional as much as civic: a society that trains itself to demand decrees will eventually stop producing citizens capable of resisting them.