"While everyone has a right to his or her opinion, the people who are informed have more of a right"
About this Quote
Dixon draws a sharp line between the equality of speech and the inequality of knowledge. Everyone may speak, yet not every claim carries the same weight. The phrase "more of a right" is deliberately provocative: not a legal privilege to be enforced by the state, but a moral and epistemic authority earned through study, experience, and accountability.
As a pioneering jazz trumpeter, organizer of the October Revolution in Jazz, and a longtime educator, Dixon spent his career confronting the gap between surface opinions and hard-won understanding. Avant-garde Black musicians were often judged by critics who had not done the listening, the history, or the theory. Careers rose or fell on the strength of casual takes. Against that backdrop, the assertion is a defense of craft and a rebuke to glibness. If opinions shape reputations, funding, pedagogy, and the direction of culture, then the obligation to be informed is not elitist posturing; it is an ethical minimum.
Read this way, the line anticipates todays media ecosystem, where platforms flatten expertise and algorithms reward heat over light. A healthy public sphere cannot pretend that a hunch and a researched argument are interchangeable. It should calibrate attention by demonstrated knowledge, transparency of sources, willingness to revise, and proximity to the work itself. The more the claim matters, the more the duty to know.
The point is not to silence anyone. It is an invitation to earn standing. In the rehearsal room, you shed before you solo; in civic life, you learn before you pronounce. Deference to expertise should be matched by experts speaking clearly, showing their work, and engaging questions in good faith. Between those poles lies a democratic ethic: equal rights of voice, unequal claims to credence, and a path for anyone to move toward having "more of a right" by reading, listening, and testing ideas against reality.
As a pioneering jazz trumpeter, organizer of the October Revolution in Jazz, and a longtime educator, Dixon spent his career confronting the gap between surface opinions and hard-won understanding. Avant-garde Black musicians were often judged by critics who had not done the listening, the history, or the theory. Careers rose or fell on the strength of casual takes. Against that backdrop, the assertion is a defense of craft and a rebuke to glibness. If opinions shape reputations, funding, pedagogy, and the direction of culture, then the obligation to be informed is not elitist posturing; it is an ethical minimum.
Read this way, the line anticipates todays media ecosystem, where platforms flatten expertise and algorithms reward heat over light. A healthy public sphere cannot pretend that a hunch and a researched argument are interchangeable. It should calibrate attention by demonstrated knowledge, transparency of sources, willingness to revise, and proximity to the work itself. The more the claim matters, the more the duty to know.
The point is not to silence anyone. It is an invitation to earn standing. In the rehearsal room, you shed before you solo; in civic life, you learn before you pronounce. Deference to expertise should be matched by experts speaking clearly, showing their work, and engaging questions in good faith. Between those poles lies a democratic ethic: equal rights of voice, unequal claims to credence, and a path for anyone to move toward having "more of a right" by reading, listening, and testing ideas against reality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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