We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.

If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.

Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.

Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.

The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.