Laudator Temporis Acti

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1921), p. 3:

The Uninstructed are not the Unintelligent. You will find good natural—even peasant—intelligences that, knowing nothing of the facts of a given case or of a given branch of Knowledge, will yet, on the facts being laid before them, arrive at surprisingly just conclusions. On the other hand the Instructed are only too often the unintelligent; when they are not unintelligent they are only too often the wilfully self-blinded.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane, 1945), pp. 119-120:

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.