“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice,” pastor and dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote not long before he was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.

Friday on radio, Glenn read Bonhoeffer's timeless words, taken from his letter about the dangers of stupidity.

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” Bonhoeffer wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor, was part of the resistance against Nazi Germany, and his words about the insidious risk of ignorance ring true today. The German people didn’t want to hear the facts, and when they did, they chose not to believe them.

“If you challenged them, they became angry . . . does any of that sound familiar?” Glenn asked.