When I look back on my long life, I am not aware of having undergone
any serious conversions from the days of my youth, or of having
abandoned my basic ideals or surrendered my faith in intelligence as
the most reliable guide in solving problems — to the extent that they
are soluble.
As the reader will have noted, I have made grievous errors in judgment
— about persons and movments and about the possibilities of
progressive changes in American life — but the ideals that led me into
these errors are the very ones that, in the light of historical
evidence, led me out of them. Idealism, alas, does not protect one
from ignorance, dogmatism, and foosishness.
-- Sidney Hook Out of Step: an unquiet life in the 20th
century, 1987.