Efficiency
Efficiency 7 It is estimated that if all redundant passages were eliminated the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes, and there would be no need for an interval. Anonymous. A Random Walk in Science. [If all redundancy were removed from a concert it would take twenty minutes instead of two hours.]
Ego and Egotism
Ego 205 We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves…. George Eliot, Middlemarch. [We all think that the world is for us alone; that is we are born with moral stupidity.]
Egotism 411 …a man never speaks of himself without loss: his condemnation of himself is always credited, his praise of himself discredited. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Einstein
Einstein 2 It is not surprising therefore that many a college graduate still thinks of Einstein as a kind of mathematical surrealist rather than as the discoverer of certain cosmic laws of immense importance in man’s slow struggle to understand physical reality. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
Einstein 53 E = mc2: …energy contained in any particle of matter is equal to the mass of that body multiplied by the square of the velocity of light…extraordinary relationship becomes more vivid when its terms are translated into concrete values: i.e., one kilogram of coal (about two pounds), if converted entirely into energy, would yield 25 billion kilowatt hours of electricity or as much as all the power plants in the U.S. could generate by running steadily for two months. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein [E=MC2 means that if matter could be converted to energy that energy could be incredibly productive.]
Einstein 86 In the Einstein universe there are no straight lines, there are only great circles. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein [The Einstein universe has no straight lines but only circles.]
Emerson
Emerson 1076 The music that can deepest reach/ And cure all ill, is cordial speech. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Considerations by the Way.
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson 291 ...she wrote lyrical meditations...while practicing an art of singular economy. Bloom, Western Canon. [Dickinson wrote lyrical meditations very concisely.]
Emily Dickinson 291 What her critics almost always underestimate is her startling intellectual complexity. Bloom, Western Canon.
Emily Dickinson 308 Dickinson’s way...favors questioning over interpretation. Bloom, Western Canon.
Emotion
Emotion 14 As John Buchan wrote of a friend in John Kennedy’s favorite book, Pilgrim’s Way, “He disliked [shows of] emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply.” Sorenson, Kennedy
Emotion 151 Catherine: Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words?
Emotion 669 Despair and penitence are two very different things. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Emotion 85 Giovanni Pisano’s relief in Pistoia of the Massacre of the Innocents: I did not weep, so much of stone had I become within. Clark, Civilization. [I did not weep because my heart had become stone.]
Emotion 183 Spinoza: “An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed except by a contrary and stronger emotion.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza. [Only a stronger and contrary emotion will overcome another emotion.]
Emotion 370 ...and suddenly she reached her hands upward in an ecstasy of life and strength and gladness: “O God,” [Nan] said, “I thank thee for my future.” Jewett, A Country Doctor.
Emotion 1058 …an emotion more delightful than he had often felt before, but which he forbore to analyze, lest, if he seized it, it should at once perish in his grasp. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun. [He felt the emotion strongly, but did not analyze it because he was afraid he would lose it.]
Emotion and reason 183 Spinoza knows that as passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Emotions 180 Spinoza: A passion or an emotion is bad or good not in itself, but only as it decreases or enhances our power. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia 117 Encarta includes 26,000 topics with 9 million words of text, 8 hours of sounds, 7,0000 photographs and illustrations, 800 maps, 250 interactive charts and tables, and 100 animations and video clips...costs less than $100 [and comes on a wafer thin disk about six inches in diameter]. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Monday, April 30, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 30, 2007.
Note: Several of my readers have said that some of the quotes are convoluted and/or verbose. In either case they are hard to read. As a service to my readers, I will add at the end of difficult quotes a plainly written statement of the basic idea. Hope this helps. Rays.
Economics
Economics 383 Spencer: Economic relationships are so different from political relationships, and so much more complex, that no government could regulate them all without…an enslaving bureaucracy. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer. [Regulating economics would produce an enslaving bureaucracy.]
Economics 383 Spencer: Economic relations must be left to the automatic self-adjustment…of supply and demand; what society most wants it will pay for most heavily. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer. [Economics is essentially supply and demand.]
Economics and inflation 722 Soon they would be saying in Richmond, “You take your money to market in a market basket and bring home what you buy in your pocketbook.” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. [Civil War inflation.]
Ecumenism
Ecumenism 154 Mutual respect is a prerequisite for authentic ecumenism. Pope John Paul II, Threshold
Education
Education 342 “We must never accept utility as the sole reason for education.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Education 267 Sir Eric Ashby: “To train young people in the dialectic between orthodoxy and dissent is the unique contribution which universities make to society.” Eiseley, The Star Thrower. [The purpose of a university education is to learn to deal with orthodoxy and dissent.]
Education 197 All this information, however, is not going to solve the serious problems facing many public schools today: budget cuts, violence, drugs, high dropout rates, dangerous neighborhoods, teachers more concerned about survival than education. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education 197 The problem of America’s schools are not insurmountable, just extremely complicated. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education 197 Even today, for every disastrous public school there are dozens of successful ones you don’t read about. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education 919 Robert Kennedy…laid emphasis on pre-school education, pointing out that the formative years of a child’s life were before the age of six or seven and that many children from poor families arrived in the first grade so far behind that they could never catch up. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Education 12 …Beatrice O’ Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again, a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about…. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise. [A kind of education that looked upon things and people with either contempt and charm.]
Education 250 If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms…. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
Education 553 JFK: “Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other human beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning and betrays his obligations.” Sorenson, Kennedy.
Education 7 “Idealism” . . . is now the fashion in our schools and colleges, where all aesthetic and most intellectual standards are being abandoned in the name of social harmony and the remedying of historical injustice. Bloom, Western Canon. [The purpose of a college education today is social harmony and remedying historical injustice, not scholarship.]
Education 483 Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees…. Thoreau, Walden.
Education 237 He [Heathcliff] appeared to have bent his malevolence on making him [Hareton] a brute: he was never taught to read or write; never rebuked for any bad habit which did not annoy his keeper; never led a single step towards virtue, or guarded by a single precept against vice. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights. [The education of a brute.]
Education 21 Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school--not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems--and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity...[but] where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies. Austen, Emma [A school for girls that did not inculcate morality and refinement, but which kept the girls out of the way of their families, with little education to disturb the status quo.]
Education 12 I am aware I may here be reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso’s infusion of honey into the medicine prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley. [Education with games does not produce serious education.]
Education 12 It may…be subject of serious consideration, whether those who are accustomed only to acquire instruction through the medium of amusement, may not be brought to reject that which approaches under the aspect of study…. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley. [Those who acquire instruction through amusement will not be willing or able to study.]
Education 366 You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically—she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. T. H. White, The Once and Future King. [Experience is the only method for learning to walk,]
Education 104 …wince involuntarily, as we remember the hard knuckles with which the reverend old lady who instilled into our mind the first principles of education…was wont to poke our juvenile head occasionally by way of adjusting the confusion of ideas in which we were generally involved. Dickens, Sketches by Boz. [The old school marms used knuckles on the head to unconfuse one's ideas.]
Education 12 The New-England meeting-house, like the synagogue on which it was consciously modeled, was primarily a place of instruction. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience
Education 145 Rev. Hugh Jones: They [Americans] are more inclinable to read men by business and conversation, than to dive into books, and are for the most part only desirous of learning what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest and best method. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience [Americans are inclined to read men and conversation rather than books.]
Education 171 In Europe a “liberal” education, which would supposedly liberate a man from the narrow bounds of his time and place, was the property of an exclusive few. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience [A 'liberal education' was designed to liberate one from the bounds of time and place.]
Education 304 English visitors found it hard to believe that a prosperous ruling class would rather learn directly from experience than from books. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience. [Europe was skeptical of Americans' learning directly from experience rather than from books. ]
Education 162 That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. Nabokov, Lolita. [We want girls to be lively rather than stuck in musty books.]
Education 310 ...early example of the American identification of learning with self-improvement. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience
Education 161 ...the institution might turn out to be one of those where girls are taught...”not to spell very well, but to smell very well.” Nabokov, Lolita.
Education 72 Whoever needs more than five hours of sleep should not study medicine. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).
Education 161 Why is it that doctors see only what they have learned to see? Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud). [Doctors do what they have learned, not what they see.]
Education 497 Latin and Greek were introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Education 497 …it was not for the sake of studying the classics they introduced the Latin, but solely as a police measure, to stupefy the intelligence. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Education 381 “Part of our job is to take kids with sixth-grade educations and prepare them to go to MIT.” Wiliam Watley, Pastor of St. James Methodist Episcopal Church, Newark, New Jersey. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Education 388 Schools in urban America are beset by multiple problems: students in poor health, streets filled with danger, buildings in disrepair, families without enough parental time and less take-home pay, teachers who are overworked and called upon to ensure safety as well as teach mathematics and history, administrators who become detached from the crisis and make holding on to a paycheck more important than improving the school, state legislators who mandate higher test scores without providing the needed resources and thereby force pragmatic principals to sacrifice genuine education and teach for the test, and parents who hate sending their children into a cauldron of drugs and blood but don’t have any good alternative. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past. [The many problems with today's urban schools.]
Education 399 The zest for lifetime learning will be the entrepreneurial energy of a knowledge-based society. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past. [Knowledge will be so prevalent that people will want to go on learning for a life time.]
Education viii …the function of the professional teacher was clear…to mediate between the specialist and the nation; to learn the specialist’s language…and find for new truths old terms that all literate people might understand. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. [One role of a teacher is to mediate between the specialist and generally literate people.]
Education xv …we might build up in America an audience fit to listen to geniuses, and therefore ready to produce them. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. [We need an audience who can listen to geniuses in order to produce them.]
Education xxv We are like Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov—“one of those who don’t want millions, but an answer to their questions.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.
Education xxv …we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.
Education xxviii Leonardo: “The noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.
Education xxviii Emerson: In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. [Every person is my pupil.]
Education 26 ...studies are not to be forced upon an unwilling mind. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Education 26 The elements of instruction...should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a free man should be a free man too in the acquisition of knowledge. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato. [Children cannot learn by compulsion.]
Education 26 Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato. [What one learns by compulsion is not learned.]
Education 111 F. Bacon: To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation...crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
Education 156 It was in accord with the Hebrew canon that every student should acquire some manual art. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Education 165 Spinoza: [Christ] accommodated himself to the comprehension of the people…and most often taught by parables. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Education 194 Spinoza: Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza. [Schools don't encourage man's natural abilities; they constrain them.]
Education 521 Following up on Spencer’s demand for more science and less literature, in education, Dewey added that even the science should not be book-learning, but should come to the pupil from the actual practice of useful occupations. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [You can't learn best from books; you learn best from experience.]
Education 521 Dewey: In an industrial society the school should be a miniature workshop and a miniature community...should teach through practice, and through trial and error. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [People should learn in school as people learn in the workplace.]
Education 521 Dewey: ...education must be re-conceived, not as merely a preparation for maturity...but as a continuous growth of the mind and a continuous illumination of life. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [Education should not be a preparation for learning, but should engage in actual production.]
Education 521 Dewey: Real education comes after we leave school; and there is no reason why it should stop before our death. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey.
Education 523 Dewey: ...mind and life are to be understood not in theological but in biological terms, as an organ or an organism in an environment, acted upon and reacting, molded and molding. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [Mind and life should grow through experience.]
Education 133 Whenever a given school system turns out to be relatively rational and effective, no one remembers the [school] ma'ams who make it so, for all the credit and glory are hogged by the super-gogues at the head of it. Mencken, Minority Report. [Successful schools do not praise the teachers, but the administrators.]
Education 129 Faulkner: People learn only by error. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Education 193 …and in such weather as this I think one day in the fields is worth five in the school house. Jewett, A Country Doctor. [School houses shut children away from life.]
Education 198 M.L. Robinson: Be encouraged that what you know so well others know not at all. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
Education 18 Johnson on Mr. Hunter, the headmaster: He used…to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1. [He beat us for not understanding something as for not bothering to learn something.]
Education 283 Johnson: Sir (said he) a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1. [People desire knowledge.]
Education 1020 You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ‘tis the school boys who educate him. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Culture. [The pupils educate the teachers.]
Education 1191 …this deep sleep of the higher faculties of man, coexists with a great abundance of what are called the means of learning, great activity of book making and of formal teaching. Emerson, Uncollected Prose. [Our minds are in a deep sleep notwithstanding that we know much from books and formal teaching.]
Education 594 It was complained…we are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. Emerson, New England Reformers. [We learn words, but nothing real.]
Education 599 [Our education system]…is a system of despair. Emerson, New England Reformers.
Education 599 Men do not believe in the power of education. Emerson, New England Reformers.
Education 600 …the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. Emerson, New England Reformers. [Scholars did not use knowledge to help people but only to accomplish their own selfish goals.]
Education 629 …all are teachers and pupils in turn. Emerson, Representative Men: Uses of Great Men.
Education 419 Each mind has its own method. Emerson, Intellect.
Education 385 Experimental college at the University of Wisconsin: There were no classes as such, the emphasis…on education, on opening the mind…the first year…spent studying nothing but Greek civilization, the second nothing but nineteenth-century American civilization and comparing the values of the two civilizations. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest. [Example of a reformed university education: comparing Greek and American society.]
Education 38 It is not a mind, it is not a body, that we are training; it is a man, and we must not divide him into two parts; and, as Plato says, we must not train one without the other, but drive them abreast like two horses harnessed to the same pole. Montaigne, Selected Essays. [Both mind and body must be trained together.]
Education 51 …I believe I should have brought nothing away from school but a hatred of books, as almost all our noblemen do. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Education 221 A good education changes the judgment and way of living…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Education 418 For being more learned they are none the less fools. Montaigne, Selected Essays. [Greater learning can sometimes produce bigger fools.]
Education 12 In high school we obediently went through brief courses in elementary physics and chemistry, without the faintest glimmering ever percolating into our minds about the rigor and the glories of the scientific method, the long heart-breaking struggle of men to establish it against institutionalized superstition, or how and why it made our age fundamentally different, more wonderful and more terrible, than all preceding ages. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream. [In high school we did not really learn the nature of learning.]
Education 487 Their [the American soldiers’] education had given them the ability to read and write and follow a map; it had not given them intellectual curiosity and without this they could not be said to have received any education. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream. [Learning to read and write without curiosity produced almost no education.]
Education 290 Shame, despair, solitude…had been her [Hester’s] teachers…had made her strong…. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Education 271 Mr. Weller on Sam: “I took a good deal o’ pain with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for his-self...the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” Dickens, Pickwick.
Education and society 524 Dewey: The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts--inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey.
Education change 254 In a changing world, education is the best preparation for being able to adapt. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education institution individual 204 The highway [i.e. Internet] will alter the focus of education from the institution to the individual. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education learning 204 The ultimate goal will be changed from getting a diploma to enjoying life-long learning. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 184 Some fear that technology will dehumanize formal education. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 186 Preschoolers familiar with cellular telephones, pagers, and personal computers enter kindergartens where chalkboards and overhead projectors represent the state of the art. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 186 Reed Hundt, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission: …”there are thousands of buildings in this country with millions of people in them who have no telephones, no cable TV, and no reasonable prospect of broadband services…they are called schools. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 191 Her ability to influence what she sees on the screen—to answer the question, “What happens if I click here?”—keeps her curiosity high. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 192 I’ve always believed most people have more intelligence and curiosity than current information tools encourage them to use. [education and technology] Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 196 Testing will become a positive part of the learning process: a mistake won’t call forth a reprimand; it will trigger the system to help the student overcome this misunderstanding. Gates, The Road Ahead. [Real testing helps students understand their mistakes.]
Education technology 198 The good teachers of the future…will use technology as a starting point or an aid. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Educational leadership 133 The [super-gogues] have incommoded the schoolma'am much more than they have aided her, and when she succeeds at her dismal task it is usually in spite of them, not because of them. Mencken, Minority Report. [Administrators get in the way of good teachers.]
Economics
Economics 383 Spencer: Economic relationships are so different from political relationships, and so much more complex, that no government could regulate them all without…an enslaving bureaucracy. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer. [Regulating economics would produce an enslaving bureaucracy.]
Economics 383 Spencer: Economic relations must be left to the automatic self-adjustment…of supply and demand; what society most wants it will pay for most heavily. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer. [Economics is essentially supply and demand.]
Economics and inflation 722 Soon they would be saying in Richmond, “You take your money to market in a market basket and bring home what you buy in your pocketbook.” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. [Civil War inflation.]
Ecumenism
Ecumenism 154 Mutual respect is a prerequisite for authentic ecumenism. Pope John Paul II, Threshold
Education
Education 342 “We must never accept utility as the sole reason for education.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Education 267 Sir Eric Ashby: “To train young people in the dialectic between orthodoxy and dissent is the unique contribution which universities make to society.” Eiseley, The Star Thrower. [The purpose of a university education is to learn to deal with orthodoxy and dissent.]
Education 197 All this information, however, is not going to solve the serious problems facing many public schools today: budget cuts, violence, drugs, high dropout rates, dangerous neighborhoods, teachers more concerned about survival than education. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education 197 The problem of America’s schools are not insurmountable, just extremely complicated. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education 197 Even today, for every disastrous public school there are dozens of successful ones you don’t read about. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education 919 Robert Kennedy…laid emphasis on pre-school education, pointing out that the formative years of a child’s life were before the age of six or seven and that many children from poor families arrived in the first grade so far behind that they could never catch up. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Education 12 …Beatrice O’ Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again, a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about…. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise. [A kind of education that looked upon things and people with either contempt and charm.]
Education 250 If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms…. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
Education 553 JFK: “Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other human beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning and betrays his obligations.” Sorenson, Kennedy.
Education 7 “Idealism” . . . is now the fashion in our schools and colleges, where all aesthetic and most intellectual standards are being abandoned in the name of social harmony and the remedying of historical injustice. Bloom, Western Canon. [The purpose of a college education today is social harmony and remedying historical injustice, not scholarship.]
Education 483 Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees…. Thoreau, Walden.
Education 237 He [Heathcliff] appeared to have bent his malevolence on making him [Hareton] a brute: he was never taught to read or write; never rebuked for any bad habit which did not annoy his keeper; never led a single step towards virtue, or guarded by a single precept against vice. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights. [The education of a brute.]
Education 21 Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school--not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems--and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity...[but] where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies. Austen, Emma [A school for girls that did not inculcate morality and refinement, but which kept the girls out of the way of their families, with little education to disturb the status quo.]
Education 12 I am aware I may here be reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso’s infusion of honey into the medicine prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley. [Education with games does not produce serious education.]
Education 12 It may…be subject of serious consideration, whether those who are accustomed only to acquire instruction through the medium of amusement, may not be brought to reject that which approaches under the aspect of study…. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley. [Those who acquire instruction through amusement will not be willing or able to study.]
Education 366 You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically—she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. T. H. White, The Once and Future King. [Experience is the only method for learning to walk,]
Education 104 …wince involuntarily, as we remember the hard knuckles with which the reverend old lady who instilled into our mind the first principles of education…was wont to poke our juvenile head occasionally by way of adjusting the confusion of ideas in which we were generally involved. Dickens, Sketches by Boz. [The old school marms used knuckles on the head to unconfuse one's ideas.]
Education 12 The New-England meeting-house, like the synagogue on which it was consciously modeled, was primarily a place of instruction. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience
Education 145 Rev. Hugh Jones: They [Americans] are more inclinable to read men by business and conversation, than to dive into books, and are for the most part only desirous of learning what is absolutely necessary, in the shortest and best method. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience [Americans are inclined to read men and conversation rather than books.]
Education 171 In Europe a “liberal” education, which would supposedly liberate a man from the narrow bounds of his time and place, was the property of an exclusive few. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience [A 'liberal education' was designed to liberate one from the bounds of time and place.]
Education 304 English visitors found it hard to believe that a prosperous ruling class would rather learn directly from experience than from books. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience. [Europe was skeptical of Americans' learning directly from experience rather than from books. ]
Education 162 That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. Nabokov, Lolita. [We want girls to be lively rather than stuck in musty books.]
Education 310 ...early example of the American identification of learning with self-improvement. Boorstin, The Americans: Colonial Experience
Education 161 ...the institution might turn out to be one of those where girls are taught...”not to spell very well, but to smell very well.” Nabokov, Lolita.
Education 72 Whoever needs more than five hours of sleep should not study medicine. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).
Education 161 Why is it that doctors see only what they have learned to see? Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud). [Doctors do what they have learned, not what they see.]
Education 497 Latin and Greek were introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Education 497 …it was not for the sake of studying the classics they introduced the Latin, but solely as a police measure, to stupefy the intelligence. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Education 381 “Part of our job is to take kids with sixth-grade educations and prepare them to go to MIT.” Wiliam Watley, Pastor of St. James Methodist Episcopal Church, Newark, New Jersey. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Education 388 Schools in urban America are beset by multiple problems: students in poor health, streets filled with danger, buildings in disrepair, families without enough parental time and less take-home pay, teachers who are overworked and called upon to ensure safety as well as teach mathematics and history, administrators who become detached from the crisis and make holding on to a paycheck more important than improving the school, state legislators who mandate higher test scores without providing the needed resources and thereby force pragmatic principals to sacrifice genuine education and teach for the test, and parents who hate sending their children into a cauldron of drugs and blood but don’t have any good alternative. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past. [The many problems with today's urban schools.]
Education 399 The zest for lifetime learning will be the entrepreneurial energy of a knowledge-based society. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past. [Knowledge will be so prevalent that people will want to go on learning for a life time.]
Education viii …the function of the professional teacher was clear…to mediate between the specialist and the nation; to learn the specialist’s language…and find for new truths old terms that all literate people might understand. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. [One role of a teacher is to mediate between the specialist and generally literate people.]
Education xv …we might build up in America an audience fit to listen to geniuses, and therefore ready to produce them. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. [We need an audience who can listen to geniuses in order to produce them.]
Education xxv We are like Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov—“one of those who don’t want millions, but an answer to their questions.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.
Education xxv …we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.
Education xxviii Leonardo: “The noblest pleasure, the joy of understanding.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy.
Education xxviii Emerson: In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy. [Every person is my pupil.]
Education 26 ...studies are not to be forced upon an unwilling mind. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Education 26 The elements of instruction...should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a free man should be a free man too in the acquisition of knowledge. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato. [Children cannot learn by compulsion.]
Education 26 Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato. [What one learns by compulsion is not learned.]
Education 111 F. Bacon: To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation...crafty men condemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
Education 156 It was in accord with the Hebrew canon that every student should acquire some manual art. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Education 165 Spinoza: [Christ] accommodated himself to the comprehension of the people…and most often taught by parables. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Education 194 Spinoza: Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza. [Schools don't encourage man's natural abilities; they constrain them.]
Education 521 Following up on Spencer’s demand for more science and less literature, in education, Dewey added that even the science should not be book-learning, but should come to the pupil from the actual practice of useful occupations. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [You can't learn best from books; you learn best from experience.]
Education 521 Dewey: In an industrial society the school should be a miniature workshop and a miniature community...should teach through practice, and through trial and error. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [People should learn in school as people learn in the workplace.]
Education 521 Dewey: ...education must be re-conceived, not as merely a preparation for maturity...but as a continuous growth of the mind and a continuous illumination of life. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [Education should not be a preparation for learning, but should engage in actual production.]
Education 521 Dewey: Real education comes after we leave school; and there is no reason why it should stop before our death. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey.
Education 523 Dewey: ...mind and life are to be understood not in theological but in biological terms, as an organ or an organism in an environment, acted upon and reacting, molded and molding. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey. [Mind and life should grow through experience.]
Education 133 Whenever a given school system turns out to be relatively rational and effective, no one remembers the [school] ma'ams who make it so, for all the credit and glory are hogged by the super-gogues at the head of it. Mencken, Minority Report. [Successful schools do not praise the teachers, but the administrators.]
Education 129 Faulkner: People learn only by error. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Education 193 …and in such weather as this I think one day in the fields is worth five in the school house. Jewett, A Country Doctor. [School houses shut children away from life.]
Education 198 M.L. Robinson: Be encouraged that what you know so well others know not at all. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
Education 18 Johnson on Mr. Hunter, the headmaster: He used…to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1. [He beat us for not understanding something as for not bothering to learn something.]
Education 283 Johnson: Sir (said he) a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1. [People desire knowledge.]
Education 1020 You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ‘tis the school boys who educate him. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Culture. [The pupils educate the teachers.]
Education 1191 …this deep sleep of the higher faculties of man, coexists with a great abundance of what are called the means of learning, great activity of book making and of formal teaching. Emerson, Uncollected Prose. [Our minds are in a deep sleep notwithstanding that we know much from books and formal teaching.]
Education 594 It was complained…we are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. Emerson, New England Reformers. [We learn words, but nothing real.]
Education 599 [Our education system]…is a system of despair. Emerson, New England Reformers.
Education 599 Men do not believe in the power of education. Emerson, New England Reformers.
Education 600 …the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. Emerson, New England Reformers. [Scholars did not use knowledge to help people but only to accomplish their own selfish goals.]
Education 629 …all are teachers and pupils in turn. Emerson, Representative Men: Uses of Great Men.
Education 419 Each mind has its own method. Emerson, Intellect.
Education 385 Experimental college at the University of Wisconsin: There were no classes as such, the emphasis…on education, on opening the mind…the first year…spent studying nothing but Greek civilization, the second nothing but nineteenth-century American civilization and comparing the values of the two civilizations. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest. [Example of a reformed university education: comparing Greek and American society.]
Education 38 It is not a mind, it is not a body, that we are training; it is a man, and we must not divide him into two parts; and, as Plato says, we must not train one without the other, but drive them abreast like two horses harnessed to the same pole. Montaigne, Selected Essays. [Both mind and body must be trained together.]
Education 51 …I believe I should have brought nothing away from school but a hatred of books, as almost all our noblemen do. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Education 221 A good education changes the judgment and way of living…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Education 418 For being more learned they are none the less fools. Montaigne, Selected Essays. [Greater learning can sometimes produce bigger fools.]
Education 12 In high school we obediently went through brief courses in elementary physics and chemistry, without the faintest glimmering ever percolating into our minds about the rigor and the glories of the scientific method, the long heart-breaking struggle of men to establish it against institutionalized superstition, or how and why it made our age fundamentally different, more wonderful and more terrible, than all preceding ages. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream. [In high school we did not really learn the nature of learning.]
Education 487 Their [the American soldiers’] education had given them the ability to read and write and follow a map; it had not given them intellectual curiosity and without this they could not be said to have received any education. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream. [Learning to read and write without curiosity produced almost no education.]
Education 290 Shame, despair, solitude…had been her [Hester’s] teachers…had made her strong…. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Education 271 Mr. Weller on Sam: “I took a good deal o’ pain with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for his-self...the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” Dickens, Pickwick.
Education and society 524 Dewey: The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts--inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey.
Education change 254 In a changing world, education is the best preparation for being able to adapt. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education institution individual 204 The highway [i.e. Internet] will alter the focus of education from the institution to the individual. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education learning 204 The ultimate goal will be changed from getting a diploma to enjoying life-long learning. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 184 Some fear that technology will dehumanize formal education. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 186 Preschoolers familiar with cellular telephones, pagers, and personal computers enter kindergartens where chalkboards and overhead projectors represent the state of the art. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 186 Reed Hundt, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission: …”there are thousands of buildings in this country with millions of people in them who have no telephones, no cable TV, and no reasonable prospect of broadband services…they are called schools. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 191 Her ability to influence what she sees on the screen—to answer the question, “What happens if I click here?”—keeps her curiosity high. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 192 I’ve always believed most people have more intelligence and curiosity than current information tools encourage them to use. [education and technology] Gates, The Road Ahead.
Education technology 196 Testing will become a positive part of the learning process: a mistake won’t call forth a reprimand; it will trigger the system to help the student overcome this misunderstanding. Gates, The Road Ahead. [Real testing helps students understand their mistakes.]
Education technology 198 The good teachers of the future…will use technology as a starting point or an aid. Gates, The Road Ahead.
Educational leadership 133 The [super-gogues] have incommoded the schoolma'am much more than they have aided her, and when she succeeds at her dismal task it is usually in spite of them, not because of them. Mencken, Minority Report. [Administrators get in the way of good teachers.]
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 29, 2007
Drugs and Alcohol
Drugs and alcohol 229 Conrad Aiken: This [hashish and peyote], as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Dueling
Dueling 296 ...although we do not now quarrel according to the modes and figures of Caranza or Vincent Saviola, no one knew better than Fergus that there must be some decent pretext for a mortal duel...you may challenge a man for treading on your corn in a crowd or for pushing you up to the wall, or for taking your seat in the theater; but the modern code of honor will not permit you to found a quarrel upon your right of compelling a man to continue addresses to a female relative, which the fair lady has already refused. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.
Duels 138 A story arose and lived on that when first, as the challenged party, he had his choice of weapons, he [Lincoln] said, “How about cow dung at five paces?” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Dullness
Dullness 280 Johnson: “Why, Sir, … is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Earth
Earth 29 …the earth, far from being at rest is whirling through space in a giddy and highly complicated fashion…its daily rotation about its axis at the rate of 1000 miles an hour, and its annual revolution about the sun at the rate of 20 miles a second…. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
Earth 87 ...the radius of the universe is 35 billion light years or 210,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
Ecology
Ecology 234 Thoreau, as is evidenced by his final journals, had labored to lay the foundations of a then unnamed science—ecology. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Ecology xii [Ted Browning suggested]: Instead of first identifying the best areas for development, we can identify areas that are most important for conservation of natural processes, those of special and innate landscape character, and those suitable for modification to parks, playgrounds, green space, and so forth. H. Wm. Sellers, Director, Brandywine Conservancy. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 11 Somebody once said that developers often name their developments after what has been destroyed by the development...Deerfield; Quail Hill, Darlington Woods. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 26 ...a beauty that results when living organisms evolve into near-perfect harmony with the soil, the rocks, the water, the other creatures that make their world--with their environment. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 68 All things are connected--one of ecology’s bedrock concepts. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 70 Chief Stealth: Man did not weave the web of life/ He is merely one strand in it,/ Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 94 Chief Stealth: "If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit." Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 129 …the environmental breakdown is a crisis of spirit, dealing with the fundamental spiritual question: what should be the relationship of humans to earth…. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 129 The native Americans perceived of the great spirit as a kind of cosmic connective tissue stretching through all creation, binding all parts into a fabric of spiritual harmony. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 130 Chief Stealth, a native American philosopher of the Duwamish Tribe in Washington State said this: …every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every…humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people." Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 135 Wendell Berry: We go to the wilderness to be restored…the survival of wilderness--of places that we do not change--is necessary…wildernesses are places where nature is given a free hand and where people go only as guests…function as sacred groves, places we respect and leave alone. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 138 For the sun is part of us as we are part of it: the heat that makes our normal temperature 98.6 is solar heat, transformed and made available to us by green plants. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Drugs and alcohol 229 Conrad Aiken: This [hashish and peyote], as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Dueling
Dueling 296 ...although we do not now quarrel according to the modes and figures of Caranza or Vincent Saviola, no one knew better than Fergus that there must be some decent pretext for a mortal duel...you may challenge a man for treading on your corn in a crowd or for pushing you up to the wall, or for taking your seat in the theater; but the modern code of honor will not permit you to found a quarrel upon your right of compelling a man to continue addresses to a female relative, which the fair lady has already refused. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.
Duels 138 A story arose and lived on that when first, as the challenged party, he had his choice of weapons, he [Lincoln] said, “How about cow dung at five paces?” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Dullness
Dullness 280 Johnson: “Why, Sir, … is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Earth
Earth 29 …the earth, far from being at rest is whirling through space in a giddy and highly complicated fashion…its daily rotation about its axis at the rate of 1000 miles an hour, and its annual revolution about the sun at the rate of 20 miles a second…. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
Earth 87 ...the radius of the universe is 35 billion light years or 210,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 miles. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
Ecology
Ecology 234 Thoreau, as is evidenced by his final journals, had labored to lay the foundations of a then unnamed science—ecology. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Ecology xii [Ted Browning suggested]: Instead of first identifying the best areas for development, we can identify areas that are most important for conservation of natural processes, those of special and innate landscape character, and those suitable for modification to parks, playgrounds, green space, and so forth. H. Wm. Sellers, Director, Brandywine Conservancy. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 11 Somebody once said that developers often name their developments after what has been destroyed by the development...Deerfield; Quail Hill, Darlington Woods. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 26 ...a beauty that results when living organisms evolve into near-perfect harmony with the soil, the rocks, the water, the other creatures that make their world--with their environment. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 68 All things are connected--one of ecology’s bedrock concepts. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 70 Chief Stealth: Man did not weave the web of life/ He is merely one strand in it,/ Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 94 Chief Stealth: "If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit." Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 129 …the environmental breakdown is a crisis of spirit, dealing with the fundamental spiritual question: what should be the relationship of humans to earth…. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 129 The native Americans perceived of the great spirit as a kind of cosmic connective tissue stretching through all creation, binding all parts into a fabric of spiritual harmony. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 130 Chief Stealth, a native American philosopher of the Duwamish Tribe in Washington State said this: …every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every…humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people." Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 135 Wendell Berry: We go to the wilderness to be restored…the survival of wilderness--of places that we do not change--is necessary…wildernesses are places where nature is given a free hand and where people go only as guests…function as sacred groves, places we respect and leave alone. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Ecology 138 For the sun is part of us as we are part of it: the heat that makes our normal temperature 98.6 is solar heat, transformed and made available to us by green plants. Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 28, 2007.
Dreaming
Dreaming 831 I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of slumber that enveloped them. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Dreams 94 Catherine: I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me, ever after, and changed my ideas…. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
Dreams 345 What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream…and at others, what a heap of absurdities it is. Austen, Emma
Dreams 306 Seven hundred years ago—or it may have been fifteen hundred according to Malory’s notation—people took dreams as seriously as the psychiatrists do today. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.
Dreams 1394 Just as in a dream everything may be unreal, incoherent, and contradictory except the feeling behind the dream…. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Dreams 188 As in a dream a man chasing another/ cannot catch him, nor can he in flight/ escape from his pursuer…. Homer, Iliad.
Drill and Routine
Drill and Routine 983 The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Power.
Drill and Routine 983 So in human action, against the spasm of energy, we offset the continuity of drill…spend the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a moment. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Power.
Drinking
Drinking 391 Hawthorne on the pleasures of drinking: “The temperance-men may preach till doom’s day; and still this cold and barren world will look warmer, kindlier, mellower through the medium of a toper’s glass….” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Drinking 39 A meeting between old friends should never be dry. Hawthorne, Fanshawe.
Drinking 49 One took his dram [of whiskey] because he felt sick; another to make him sleep well; and a third because he had nothing else to do. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches.
Drinking 78 It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people…can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Drinking 122 We were all irritable now with the fading ale…. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Drinking 187 Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater, and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendor. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Drinking 787 But the true purpose of their drinking—and one that will induce men to drink, or do something equivalent, as long as this weary world shall endure—was the renewed youth and vigor, the brisk, cheerful sense of things present and to come, with which, for about a quarter-of-an-hour, the dram permeated their systems. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Drinking 789 The flavor of this wine, added he, and its perfume, still more than its taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Drinking 181 Hot punch is a pleasant thing, gentlemen--an extremely pleasant thing under any circumstances--but in that snug old parlor, before the roaring fire, with the wind blowing outside till every timber in the old house creaked.... Dickens, Pickwick.
Drinking 528 As the cocked hat would have been spoilt if left there, Sam very considerately flattened it down on the head of the gentleman in blue, and putting the big stick in his hand, propped him up against his own street door, rang the bell, and walked quietly home. Dickens, Pickwick.
Drinking : 17 Like a gas lamp in the street, with the wind in the pipe, he had exhibited for a moment an unnatural brilliancy; then sunk so low as to be scarcely discernible. Dickens, Pickwick.
Drunkenness 183 [Drunk]: he was conscious that he was talking in a loud voice, very succinctly and convincingly. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
Dreaming 831 I must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the circumstances of which utterly vanished at the moment when they converged to some tragical catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of slumber that enveloped them. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Dreams 94 Catherine: I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me, ever after, and changed my ideas…. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
Dreams 345 What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream…and at others, what a heap of absurdities it is. Austen, Emma
Dreams 306 Seven hundred years ago—or it may have been fifteen hundred according to Malory’s notation—people took dreams as seriously as the psychiatrists do today. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.
Dreams 1394 Just as in a dream everything may be unreal, incoherent, and contradictory except the feeling behind the dream…. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Dreams 188 As in a dream a man chasing another/ cannot catch him, nor can he in flight/ escape from his pursuer…. Homer, Iliad.
Drill and Routine
Drill and Routine 983 The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Power.
Drill and Routine 983 So in human action, against the spasm of energy, we offset the continuity of drill…spend the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a moment. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Power.
Drinking
Drinking 391 Hawthorne on the pleasures of drinking: “The temperance-men may preach till doom’s day; and still this cold and barren world will look warmer, kindlier, mellower through the medium of a toper’s glass….” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Drinking 39 A meeting between old friends should never be dry. Hawthorne, Fanshawe.
Drinking 49 One took his dram [of whiskey] because he felt sick; another to make him sleep well; and a third because he had nothing else to do. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches.
Drinking 78 It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people…can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Drinking 122 We were all irritable now with the fading ale…. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Drinking 187 Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater, and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his misery, with the pittance which, divided among his family, would furnish a morsel of bread for each, gin-shops will increase in number and splendor. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Drinking 787 But the true purpose of their drinking—and one that will induce men to drink, or do something equivalent, as long as this weary world shall endure—was the renewed youth and vigor, the brisk, cheerful sense of things present and to come, with which, for about a quarter-of-an-hour, the dram permeated their systems. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Drinking 789 The flavor of this wine, added he, and its perfume, still more than its taste, makes me remember that I was once a young man. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Drinking 181 Hot punch is a pleasant thing, gentlemen--an extremely pleasant thing under any circumstances--but in that snug old parlor, before the roaring fire, with the wind blowing outside till every timber in the old house creaked.... Dickens, Pickwick.
Drinking 528 As the cocked hat would have been spoilt if left there, Sam very considerately flattened it down on the head of the gentleman in blue, and putting the big stick in his hand, propped him up against his own street door, rang the bell, and walked quietly home. Dickens, Pickwick.
Drinking : 17 Like a gas lamp in the street, with the wind in the pipe, he had exhibited for a moment an unnatural brilliancy; then sunk so low as to be scarcely discernible. Dickens, Pickwick.
Drunkenness 183 [Drunk]: he was conscious that he was talking in a loud voice, very succinctly and convincingly. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 27, 2007.
Discussion
Discussion 414 Cicero: For there can be discussion without contradiction. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Disease
Disease 235 Chillingworth: A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Disease 235 Chillingworth: …a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Doctors
Doctors 64 …for we may lay it down as a maxim, that when a nation abounds in physicians, it grows thin of people. Addison, 3/24/1711. The Spectator.
Doctrine
Doctrine 83 The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. Hoffer, The True Believer
Doctrine 85 The true doctrine is a master key to all the world’s problems. Hoffer, The True Believer
Dogmatism
Dogmatic 260 …with bigness there often emerges a dogmatic rigidity. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Dogmatism 263 The dogmatisms of each age wear out. E. Hamilton. The Greek Way
Doublespeak
Doublespeak 206 Hitler: …after a critical diagnosis incurable persons may be granted a mercy death. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 211 Race and Resettlement Office…responsible for the ‘racial’ purification of the Reich…. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 312 …Keitel corrected the sentence with his customary purple pencil: “I did not say shoot[;] I said turn over to the Secret Police.” Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 472 Jackson: They all speak with Nazi double-talk…in the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem was a phrase that meant extermination; ‘special treatment’ of prisoners of war meant killing; ‘protective custody’ meant concentration camps. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 298 W.H. Auden: When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Doubt
Doubt 1197 The purest saints that I have ever known were long, very long, in darkness and in doubt. Emerson, Uncollected Prose.
Drama
Drama 423 Nietzsche…believes that our pleasure in the tragic drama…is a refined and vicarious cruelty. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
Drama 109 Thornton Wilder: [The theater should be...] experience for experience’s sake--rather than for moral improvement’s sake. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Drama 110 Thornton Wilder: ...a dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Drama 241 Johnson: …it is regarded as a kind of dramatic impiety to maintain that virtue should not be rewarded, nor vice punished in the last scene of the last act of every tragedy…[but] labors in vain to inculcate a doctrine in theory, which everyone knows to be false, vis., that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness; and vice of misery. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Drama 483 The curate: …because the public after seeing a well-written and well-constructed play, would come away delighted by the comic part, instructed by the serious, intrigued by the plot, enlivened by the witty quips, warned by the tricks, edified by the moral, incensed against vice, and enamored of virtue. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part One: 1605.
Drama 120 And as the principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end, if we always make virtue and innocence happy and successful. Addison, 4/16/1711. The Spectator.
Drama 399 Euripides: These wholesome habits, then, of thought/ To this democracy I taught:/ I showed them logic on the stage/ Till logic now is all the rage. Aristophanes, Frogs.
Drama 1 Aristophanes created his own world and populated it with his own people, as a god might do. Hadas, ed., The Complete Works of Aristophanes.
Discussion 414 Cicero: For there can be discussion without contradiction. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Disease
Disease 235 Chillingworth: A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Disease 235 Chillingworth: …a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Doctors
Doctors 64 …for we may lay it down as a maxim, that when a nation abounds in physicians, it grows thin of people. Addison, 3/24/1711. The Spectator.
Doctrine
Doctrine 83 The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. Hoffer, The True Believer
Doctrine 85 The true doctrine is a master key to all the world’s problems. Hoffer, The True Believer
Dogmatism
Dogmatic 260 …with bigness there often emerges a dogmatic rigidity. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Dogmatism 263 The dogmatisms of each age wear out. E. Hamilton. The Greek Way
Doublespeak
Doublespeak 206 Hitler: …after a critical diagnosis incurable persons may be granted a mercy death. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 211 Race and Resettlement Office…responsible for the ‘racial’ purification of the Reich…. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 312 …Keitel corrected the sentence with his customary purple pencil: “I did not say shoot[;] I said turn over to the Secret Police.” Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 472 Jackson: They all speak with Nazi double-talk…in the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem was a phrase that meant extermination; ‘special treatment’ of prisoners of war meant killing; ‘protective custody’ meant concentration camps. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
Doublespeak 298 W.H. Auden: When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Doubt
Doubt 1197 The purest saints that I have ever known were long, very long, in darkness and in doubt. Emerson, Uncollected Prose.
Drama
Drama 423 Nietzsche…believes that our pleasure in the tragic drama…is a refined and vicarious cruelty. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
Drama 109 Thornton Wilder: [The theater should be...] experience for experience’s sake--rather than for moral improvement’s sake. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Drama 110 Thornton Wilder: ...a dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Drama 241 Johnson: …it is regarded as a kind of dramatic impiety to maintain that virtue should not be rewarded, nor vice punished in the last scene of the last act of every tragedy…[but] labors in vain to inculcate a doctrine in theory, which everyone knows to be false, vis., that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness; and vice of misery. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Drama 483 The curate: …because the public after seeing a well-written and well-constructed play, would come away delighted by the comic part, instructed by the serious, intrigued by the plot, enlivened by the witty quips, warned by the tricks, edified by the moral, incensed against vice, and enamored of virtue. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part One: 1605.
Drama 120 And as the principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end, if we always make virtue and innocence happy and successful. Addison, 4/16/1711. The Spectator.
Drama 399 Euripides: These wholesome habits, then, of thought/ To this democracy I taught:/ I showed them logic on the stage/ Till logic now is all the rage. Aristophanes, Frogs.
Drama 1 Aristophanes created his own world and populated it with his own people, as a god might do. Hadas, ed., The Complete Works of Aristophanes.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 26, 2007
Desires
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : Desire is infinite, fulfillment is limited. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : …fulfillment never satisfies. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : Each individual bears within himself a disruptive contradiction; the realized desire develops a new desire, and so on endlessly. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.
Desires 72 …certainly, the mistakes that we male and female animals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Despair
Despair 267 Hester: There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Destiny
Destiny 385 I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. Emerson, The Over-Soul.
Destiny 1349 …so every individual bears within himself his own aims and yet bears them so as to serve a general purpose unfathomable by man. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Devil
Devil 53 It will be seen...that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same: first he would tempt me--and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. Nabokov, Lolita.
Devil 216 I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Devotion
Devotion 15 All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hoffer, The True Believer
Dialogue
Dialogue 246 Interviewers: Do you try to write a poetic prose? N. Algren: No, I’m not writing it, but so many people say things poetically, they say it for you in a way you never could. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Dickens
Dickens 317 Dickens: ...fairy tales...told as though they were sagas of social realism. Bloom, Western Canon.
Dickens x …the eyes which observed the tragedy and comedy of life in such vivid detail; which saw and recorded brutality and pathos, courage and despair, and all the innumerable absurdities of human behavior. Intro. by Thea Holme. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy 326 Second Athenian: This is the advice I’d give the Athenians--/ See our ambassadors are always drunk/ For when we visit Sparta sober, then/ We’re on the alert for trickery all the while/ So that we miss half of the things they say/ And misinterpret things that were never said,/ And then report the muddle back to Athens. Aristophanes, Lysistrata.
Diplomats 382 ...empty bundles of good manners. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Discipline
Discipline 225 [Johnson on the popularity of monastic life]: Man will submit to any rule, by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance…are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 434 Johnson: The master who punishes not only consults the future happiness of him who is the immediate subject of correction, but he propagates obedience through the whole school; and establishes regularity by exemplary justice. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 436 Johnson: It [severity] is the way to govern them [schoolboys]…[but] I know not whether it be the way to mend them. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 564 Johnson: The objection in which is urged the injustice of making the innocent suffer with the guilty, is an objection…against society…[since] all societies, great and small, subsist upon this condition: that as the individuals derive advantages from union, they may likewise suffer inconveniences. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 589 Johnson: There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 75 Joseph Heller: There’s an essay of T.S. Eliot’s in which he praises the disciplines of writing, claiming that if one is forced to write within a certain framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : Desire is infinite, fulfillment is limited. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : …fulfillment never satisfies. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : Each individual bears within himself a disruptive contradiction; the realized desire develops a new desire, and so on endlessly. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.
Desires 72 …certainly, the mistakes that we male and female animals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Despair
Despair 267 Hester: There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Destiny
Destiny 385 I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. Emerson, The Over-Soul.
Destiny 1349 …so every individual bears within himself his own aims and yet bears them so as to serve a general purpose unfathomable by man. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Devil
Devil 53 It will be seen...that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same: first he would tempt me--and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. Nabokov, Lolita.
Devil 216 I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Devotion
Devotion 15 All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hoffer, The True Believer
Dialogue
Dialogue 246 Interviewers: Do you try to write a poetic prose? N. Algren: No, I’m not writing it, but so many people say things poetically, they say it for you in a way you never could. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
Dickens
Dickens 317 Dickens: ...fairy tales...told as though they were sagas of social realism. Bloom, Western Canon.
Dickens x …the eyes which observed the tragedy and comedy of life in such vivid detail; which saw and recorded brutality and pathos, courage and despair, and all the innumerable absurdities of human behavior. Intro. by Thea Holme. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy 326 Second Athenian: This is the advice I’d give the Athenians--/ See our ambassadors are always drunk/ For when we visit Sparta sober, then/ We’re on the alert for trickery all the while/ So that we miss half of the things they say/ And misinterpret things that were never said,/ And then report the muddle back to Athens. Aristophanes, Lysistrata.
Diplomats 382 ...empty bundles of good manners. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Discipline
Discipline 225 [Johnson on the popularity of monastic life]: Man will submit to any rule, by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance…are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 434 Johnson: The master who punishes not only consults the future happiness of him who is the immediate subject of correction, but he propagates obedience through the whole school; and establishes regularity by exemplary justice. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 436 Johnson: It [severity] is the way to govern them [schoolboys]…[but] I know not whether it be the way to mend them. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 564 Johnson: The objection in which is urged the injustice of making the innocent suffer with the guilty, is an objection…against society…[since] all societies, great and small, subsist upon this condition: that as the individuals derive advantages from union, they may likewise suffer inconveniences. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 589 Johnson: There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Discipline 75 Joseph Heller: There’s an essay of T.S. Eliot’s in which he praises the disciplines of writing, claiming that if one is forced to write within a certain framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 25, 2007. Demagogue. Democracy.
Demagogue
Demagogue 149 The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convincing people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. Hoffer, The True Believer
Democracy
Democracy viii Peter Gay, quoting Bracher: “The German dictatorship has failed, but German democracy has not yet been secured.” Bracher, The German Dictatorship
Democracy 496 Whereas the old national idea emphasized divisiveness, the present demands that nationalism everywhere be replaced by an international policy attuned to the rules of democracies, to discussion and compromise. Bracher, The German Dictatorship.
Democracy 697 JFK: “For there is no place in democratic life for institutions which benefit the few while denying the needs of the many….” Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Democracy 91 The spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in. Hoffer, The True Believer
Democracy 173 When its existence is threatened and it has to unify its people and generate in them a spirit of utmost self-sacrifice, the democratic nation must transform itself into something akin to a militant church or a revolutionary party. Hoffer, The True Believer
Democracy 73 Lincoln: For my own part, I consider the first necessity that is upon us, is of proving that popular government is not an absurdity…must settle this question now—whether in a free government the minority have the right to break it up whenever they choose; if we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Democracy 4 …the Athenian oligarchic party, led by Critias, advocated the abandonment of democracy on the score of its inefficiency in war…. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Democracy 20 But even democracy ruins itself by excess--of democracy. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Democracy 32 Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Democracy 88 …because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
Democracy 195 Spinoza: The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power…. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Democracy 431 Nietzsche: Worst of all are the English; it is they who corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion; “shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
Democracy 432 Nietzsche: Democracy...the enthronement of liberty and chaos. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
Democracy 521 Dewey: ...fellowship in occupation makes for a democracy. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey.
Democracy 27 [In a democracy] the man who is barely human is treated as if he were the peer of Aristotle. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 119 The elements in democracy that are sound in logic and of genuine cultural value may be briefly listed: equality before the law; the limitation of government; free speech. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 139 …democracy…the heavy stressing of self-reliance, the doctrine of equality before the law, government by laws not men, the insistence upon free competition. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 197 [Democracy] is, at its best, only a scheme to counteract the natural differences between man and man by setting up artificial likenesses…a relentless hatred of every sort of superiority. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 202 The masses of the people are quite as incapable of deciding questions of government as they are of deciding questions of medicine. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 219 We must grasp the idea that democracy is really not final and absolute, and that totalitarianism in some form or other may succeed it. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 620 At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief, anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it hurt our boys and helped the other side. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
Democracy 250 Lincoln: As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master…expresses my idea of democracy…whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.
Democracy and totalitarianism 147 The totalitarian paternalism of the Jesuits apparently fitted South American conditions enormously better than democracy[;] nevertheless, democratic theory prevailed, and the whole of Latin America has been racked by turmoil and corruption ever since. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy vs. aristocracy 504 Santayana wonders was there not more happiness for men in the old aristocratic doctrine that the good is not liberty, but wisdom, and contentment with one’s natural restrictions; the classical tradition knew that only a few can win[;] but now that democracy has opened the great free-for-all, catch-as-catch-can wrestling match of laissez-faire industrialism, every soul is torn with climbing, and no one knows content. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Santayana.
Demagogue 149 The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convincing people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. Hoffer, The True Believer
Democracy
Democracy viii Peter Gay, quoting Bracher: “The German dictatorship has failed, but German democracy has not yet been secured.” Bracher, The German Dictatorship
Democracy 496 Whereas the old national idea emphasized divisiveness, the present demands that nationalism everywhere be replaced by an international policy attuned to the rules of democracies, to discussion and compromise. Bracher, The German Dictatorship.
Democracy 697 JFK: “For there is no place in democratic life for institutions which benefit the few while denying the needs of the many….” Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Democracy 91 The spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in. Hoffer, The True Believer
Democracy 173 When its existence is threatened and it has to unify its people and generate in them a spirit of utmost self-sacrifice, the democratic nation must transform itself into something akin to a militant church or a revolutionary party. Hoffer, The True Believer
Democracy 73 Lincoln: For my own part, I consider the first necessity that is upon us, is of proving that popular government is not an absurdity…must settle this question now—whether in a free government the minority have the right to break it up whenever they choose; if we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Democracy 4 …the Athenian oligarchic party, led by Critias, advocated the abandonment of democracy on the score of its inefficiency in war…. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Democracy 20 But even democracy ruins itself by excess--of democracy. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Democracy 32 Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Democracy 88 …because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
Democracy 195 Spinoza: The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power…. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Democracy 431 Nietzsche: Worst of all are the English; it is they who corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion; “shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
Democracy 432 Nietzsche: Democracy...the enthronement of liberty and chaos. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
Democracy 521 Dewey: ...fellowship in occupation makes for a democracy. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, John Dewey.
Democracy 27 [In a democracy] the man who is barely human is treated as if he were the peer of Aristotle. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 119 The elements in democracy that are sound in logic and of genuine cultural value may be briefly listed: equality before the law; the limitation of government; free speech. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 139 …democracy…the heavy stressing of self-reliance, the doctrine of equality before the law, government by laws not men, the insistence upon free competition. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 197 [Democracy] is, at its best, only a scheme to counteract the natural differences between man and man by setting up artificial likenesses…a relentless hatred of every sort of superiority. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 202 The masses of the people are quite as incapable of deciding questions of government as they are of deciding questions of medicine. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 219 We must grasp the idea that democracy is really not final and absolute, and that totalitarianism in some form or other may succeed it. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy 620 At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief, anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it hurt our boys and helped the other side. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
Democracy 250 Lincoln: As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master…expresses my idea of democracy…whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.
Democracy and totalitarianism 147 The totalitarian paternalism of the Jesuits apparently fitted South American conditions enormously better than democracy[;] nevertheless, democratic theory prevailed, and the whole of Latin America has been racked by turmoil and corruption ever since. Mencken, Minority Report.
Democracy vs. aristocracy 504 Santayana wonders was there not more happiness for men in the old aristocratic doctrine that the good is not liberty, but wisdom, and contentment with one’s natural restrictions; the classical tradition knew that only a few can win[;] but now that democracy has opened the great free-for-all, catch-as-catch-can wrestling match of laissez-faire industrialism, every soul is torn with climbing, and no one knows content. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Santayana.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)