Democracy is worth fighting for, author Toni Morrison told a crowd of some 2,000 people who gathered in Youngstown Thursday. The Nobel Prize laureate spoke as part of the Skeggs Lecture Series sponsored by Youngstown State University.

To fight for democracy, she said, intelligent strength is needed. For fascism, it is not.

"For fascism," she said, "all that is need is that you cooperate, be silent, agree."

The author spoke about the battle of good and evil, modern society's hunger for graphic displays of crises and the importance of conflicts in academic thought.

Conflicts, she said, are different from crises.

"Conflict is a clash of incompatible forces," she said. "(Conflicts ) must be embraced if education is going to occur."

The mind, she said, is meant to engage itself. "It is always craving knowledge and when it is not busy trying to know, it is in disrepair. It can invent, it can imagine and, most important, it can debate."

Modern society, she said, dwells on crises. This hunger for graphic representations, she said, is fueled and "salted" by the media. She pointed to the popularity of reality shows as an example.