"Nothing threatens freedom of the personality and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man (the "gray mass," to use the cynical term of bourgeois prognosticators) by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship."

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Source : "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom" by Andrei Sakharov, ("The Threat to Intellectual Freedom"), www.sakharov-center.ru. 1968.

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