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Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door. -- Martin Amis, _Money_

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If weve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. Were no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that weve been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987

First as to speech. That privilege rests upon the premise that there is no proposition so uniformly acknowledged that it may not be lawfully challenged, questioned, and debated. It need not rest upon the further premise that there are no propositions that are not open to doubt; it is enough, even if there are, that in the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy. Hence it has been again and again unconditionally proclaimed that there are no limits to the privilege so far as words seek to affect only the hearers beliefs and not their conduct. The trouble is that conduct is almost always based upon some belief, and that to change the hearers belief will generally to some extent change his conduct, and may even evoke conduct that the law forbids. [cf. Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, 1952; The Art and Craft of Judging: The Decisions of Judge Learned Hand, edited and annotated by Hershel Shanks, The MacMillian Company, 1968.]