Crazy Fools!

 "The crazy fools!" muttered Otho. "Begging for a dictator, just because they're scared by a pack of lies".

Captain Future #2: Calling Captain Future (1940)

Edmond Hamilton 

Beware!

Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation.

Extract from "The Machine Stops", E.M. Forster 1909

Please read it ironically

The Future

"Nonsense. I am a realist. I face the future, not the past."
"But the future is built of material taken from the past, and how can we build securely when we do not know what our past has been?

Robert Moore Williams in Robot's Return (1938)

Historians

"An historian is of value only as he can translate the past in terms of the present."

The Man Who Awoke. Laurence Manning. 1933.

Ignorance

Ignorance invokes fear. It's the law.

Neil R. Harris in Labyrinth from the Professor Jameson series (Amazing Stories v10 n09 April 1936)