Against School Uniforms Quotes

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

I never killed anybody and I never developed an intense level of hatred for the enemy. Because my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there. Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy...All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

Every type of political power presupposes some particular form of human slavery, for the maintenance of which it is called into being. Just as outwardly, that is, in relation to other states the state has to create certain artificial antagonisms in order to justify its existence, so also internally the cleavage of society into castes, ranks and classes is an essential condition of its continuance. The development of the Bolshevist bureaucracy in Russia under the alleged dictatorship of the proletariat (which has never been anything but the dictatorship of a small clique over the proletariat and the whole Russian people) is merely a new instance of an old historical experience which has repeated itself countless times. This new ruling class, which to-day is rapidly growing into a new aristocracy, is set apart from the great masses of the Russian peasants and workers just as clearly as are the privileged castes and classes in other countries from the mass of the people. And this situation becomes still more unbearable when a despotic state denies to the lower classes the right to complain of existing conditions, so that any protest is made at the risk of their lives. But even a far greater degree of economic equality than that which exists in Russia would be no guarantee against political and social oppression. Economic equality alone is not social liberation. It is precisely this which all the schools of authoritarian Socialism have never understood. In the prison, in the cloister, or in the barracks one finds a fairly high degree of economic equality, as all the inmates are provided with the same dwelling, the same food, the same uniform, and the same tasks. The ancient Inca state in Peru and the Jesuit state in Paraguay had brought equal economic provision for every inhabitant to a fixed system, but in spite of this the vilest despotism prevailed there, and the human being was merely the automaton of a higher will on whose decisions he had not the slightest influence. It was not without reason that Proudhon saw in a "Socialism" without freedom the worst form of slavery. The urge for social justice can only develop properly and be effective when it grows out of man's sense of freedom and responsibility, and is based upon it. In other words, Socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this fact lies the genuine and profound justification of Anarchism.

On the switchboard of my memory two pair of gloves have crossed wires - those leather gloves of Omi's and a pair of white ceremonial gloves. I never seem to be able to decide which memory might be real, which false. Perhaps the leather gloves were more in harmony with his coarse features. And yet again, precisely because of his coarse features, perhaps it was the white pair which became him more. Coarse features - even though I use the words, actually such a description is nothing more than that of the impression created by the ordinary face of one lone young man mixed in among boys. Unrivaled though his build was, in height he was by no means the tallest among us. The pretentious uniform our school required, resembling a naval officer's, could scarely hang well on our still-immature bodies, and Omi alone filled his with a sensation of solid weight and a sort of sexuality. Surely I was not the only one who looked with envious and loving eyes at the muscles of his shoulder and chest, that sort of muscle which can be spied out even beneath a blue-serge uniform. Something like a secret feeling of superiority was always hovering about his face. Perhaps it was that sort of feeling which blazes higher and higher the more one's pride is hurt. It seemed that, for Omi, such misfortunes as failures in examinations and expulsions were the symbols of a frustrated will. The will to what? I imagined vaguely that it must be some purpose toward which his 'evil genius' was driving him. And i was certain that even he did not yet know the full purport of this vast conspiracy against him.

School teaches us that life is a game to win against our peers. We’re graded on a uniform scale no matter our background, our strengths and weaknesses, or our future goals. Sometimes we’re even graded on a curve relative to our peers. This inane, pointless system of competition is baked into the twentieth-century educational model. We’re taught that life is a game of musical chairs and that if we don’t hustle, we’re going to be left standing without a seat. This in-it-to-win-it mentality is the polar opposite of a creative mindset, which is abundant, resilient, and full of potential. Aiming to be “better” is a dead end because it means you’re walking in someone else’s footsteps and trying to catch up.

The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.

Adam Parrish. This was how it had begun: Ronan Lynch had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III's bright orange '73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn't hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning. Ronan, sure that he wouldn't find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons. This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldnt manage in a single year's use--secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan's attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face. "Who's that?" Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn't answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam's expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant. Ronan hadn't known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he'd known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.

Within our own species we have great variation between these two reactions. One man may beat his life away in furious assault on the barrier, where another simply waits for the tide to pick him up. Such variation is also observable among the higher vertebrates, particularly among domestic animals. It would be strange if it were not also true of the lower vertebrates, among the individualistic ones anyway. A fish, like the tuna or the sardine, which lives in a school, would be less likely to vary than this lonely horned shark, for the school would impose a discipline of speed and uniformity, and those individuals which would not or could not meet the school’s requirements would be killed or lost or left behind. The overfast would be eliminated by the school as readily as the over-slow, until a standard somewhere between the fast and slow had been attained. Not intending a pun, we might note that our schools have to some extent the same tendency. A Harvard man, a Yale man, a Stanford man—that is, the ideal—is as easily recognized as a tuna, and he has, by a process of elimination, survived the tests against idiocy and brilliance. Even in physical matters the standard is maintained until it is impossible, from speech, clothing, haircuts, posture, or state of mind, to tell one of these units of his school from another. In this connection it would be interesting to know whether the general collectivization of human society might not have the same effect. Factory mass production, for example, requires that every man conform to the tempo of the whole. The slow must be speeded up or eliminated, the fast slowed down. In a thoroughly collectivized state, mediocre efficiency might be very great, but only through the complete elimination of the swift, the clever, and the intelligent, as well as the incompetent. Truly collective man might in fact abandon his versatility. Among school animals there is little defense technique except headlong flight. Such species depend for survival chiefly on tremendous reproduction. The great loss of eggs and young to predators is the safety of the school, for it depends for its existence on the law of probability that out of a great many which start some will finish. It is interesting and probably not at all important to note that when a human state is attempting collectivization, one of the first steps is a frantic call by the leaders for an increased birth rate—replacement parts in a shoddy and mediocre machine.

Many reasons have been put forward by sociologists, historians, and psychologists to explain the undeviating worship of group living and group thinking in America. James Bryce credited American conformity to uniform political institutions in federal, state, and municipal government. Everywhere schools, libraries, clubs, amusements, and customs were similar. "Travel where you will," he wrote, "you feel that what you have found in one place that you will find in another." Above all, there was the rapid advance in industrial science. In America, an all-powerful technology, with its standardized techniques and methods of mass production, reached its zenith. As technology attracted larger numbers of people to urban centers, and compressed them into smaller areas, community living became a necessity. This, in turn, encouraged people to co-operate, and created relationships that invite similar activities and opinions. Gradually there emerged on the American scene, against all natural development of culture and against all individual traits inherent in every man, two striking attitudes that made American conformity broader, more unyielding, and more dangerous. The first attitude, assumed by the majority, was that the act of becoming average, of being normal, was more important than that of being distinct or superior. The second attitude, also assumed by the majority, was that the state of being well adjusted to the crowd and the community was more important than that of being a unique and original human being.

As soon as they arrived at the school their long hair was cut, their clothes were taken, and new names were handed out along with military uniforms—which is to say the war began immediately. Each day they did military drills and marched as if against themselves in daily battles happening first from the outside in, and then from the inside out like a disease. If Indian children spoke English instead of their Native tongues, they were rewarded at first, but being rewarded for not doing Indian things was not where it ended. Beatings and jail time and countless other kinds of abuse became routine. You were supposed to kill the entire Indian if they were to be saved. Later it was said that Indian children in boarding schools had the same chance of dying as soldiers in one of the world wars.

April marks the season when school begins. You wear your new school uniform, and I ask you to please be as unstylish as those fuji dawn flowers. If I find you that way, I may turn you into a gift of a potted plant against your will.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteenyear- old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea. But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line. It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people -- store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.

Danny’s life strategy of not trusting himself. “His defining emotion is doubt,” said one of his former students. “And it’s very useful. Because it makes him go deeper and deeper and deeper.” Or maybe he just wanted another line of defense against anyone hoping to figure him out. In any case, he kept at a great distance the forces and events that had shaped him. He might not trust his memories, but he still had a few. For instance, he remembered the time in late 1941 or early 1942—at any rate, a year or more after the start of the German occupation of Paris—when he was caught on the streets after curfew. The new laws required him to wear the yellow Star of David on the front of his sweater. His new badge caused him such deep shame that he took to going to school half an hour early so that the other children wouldn’t see him walking into the building wearing it. After school, on the streets, he’d turn his sweater inside out. Heading home too late one evening, he saw a German soldier approaching. “He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others—the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers,” he recalled, in the autobiographical statement required of him by the Nobel Committee. “As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.” He

Thirteen million Negroes in America have never known three of the “Four Freedoms” which America is supposedly spreading to the rest of the world. “Freedom from want” is a mockery to Negroes when they are last to be hired and first to be fired; when so many usually obtain only domestic work of short duration: when their wages are the lowest and their rents and food prices the highest. “Freedom from fear” is a myth to Negroes when they have no recourse against the “righteous” Southern citizenry who periodically find excuses to hold lynching parties; against the Northern citizenry who magnify every petty theft into a crime wave; or against those military police whose trigger fingers itch to soil a Negro soldier’s uniform with blood. “Freedom of speech” is meaningless to millions of Negroes who are kept in enforced ignorance and illiteracy by the most meager educational facilities in the South and who are sent to the most crowded schools in the North, so that throughout the country, 2,700,000 Negroes (or more than twenty per cent of the total Negro population) have had no schooling beyond the fourth grade. “Freedom of religion” is the only one of the “four freedoms” for the Negro which the ruling class has encouraged. The latter has hoped to keep Negroes satisfied by sky-pilots, saturated with spirituals, shouting for peace and security in another world and therefore content with their misery in this world. 47

She was sunshine on a rainy day, a rainbow against gray clouds, hope in a Catholic school uniform. She was why poetry was written and art created. I could deny I became a fool for love the second I saw her, but it would be a lie. She made me want to be a better man, a better person in life.

Brittany has been wary this whole week. She’s waiting for me to play a joke on her, to get her back for tossing my keys into the woods. After school, as I’m at my locker picking books to take home, she storms up to me wearing her sexy pom uniform. “Meet me in the wrestling gym,” she orders. Now I can do two things: meet her like she told me to or leave the school. I take my books and enter the small gym. Brittany is standing, holding out her keychain without keys dangling from it. “Where have my keys magically disappeared to?” she asks. “I’m going to be late for the game if you don’t tell me. Ms. Small will kick me off the squad if I’m not at the game.” “I tossed them somewhere. You know, you should really get a purse that has a zipper. You never know when someone will reach in and grab somethin’.” “Glad to know you’re a klepto. Wanna give me a hint as to where you’ve hidden them?” I lean against the wall of the wrestling gym, thinking about what people would think if they caught us in here together. “It’s in a place that’s wet. Really, really wet,” I say, giving her a clue. “The pool?” I nod. “Creative, huh?” She tries to push me into the wall. “Oh, I’m going to kill you. You better go get them.” If I didn’t know her better, I’d think she was flirting with me. I think she likes this game we have going on. “Mamacita, you should know me better than that. You’re all on your own, like I was when you left me in the library parking lot.” She cocks her head, gives me sad eyes, and pouts. I shouldn’t concentrate on her pouty lips, it’s dangerous. But I can’t help it. “Show me where they are, Alex. Please.” I let her sweat it out a minute before I give in. By now most of the school is deserted. Half of the students are on their way to the football game. The other half is glad they’re not on their way to the football game. We walk to the pool. The lights are off, but sunlight is still shining through the windows. Brittany’s keys are where I threw ‘em--in the middle of the deep end. I point to the shiny pieces of silver under the water. “There they are. Have at it.” Brittany stands with her hands on her short skirt, contemplating how she’s going to get them. She struts over to the long stick hanging on the wall that’s used to pull drowning people from the water. “Piece of cake,” she tells me. But as she sticks the pole into the water, she finds out it’s not a piece of cake. I suppress a laugh as I stand at the edge of the pool and watch her attempt the impossible. “You can always strip and go in naked. I’ll watch to make sure nobody comes in.” She walks up to me, the pole gripped firmly in her fingers. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” “Uh, yeah,” I say, stating the obvious. “I have to warn you, though. If you have granny undies on, you’ll blow my fantasy.” “For your information, they’re pink satin. As long as we’re sharing personal info, are you a boxers or briefs guy?” “Neither. My boys go free, if you know what I mean.” Okay, I don’t let my boys go free. She’ll just have to figure that out herself. “Gross, Alex.” “Don’t knock it till you try it,” I tell her, then walk toward the door. “You’re leaving?” “Uh…yeah.” “Aren’t you going to help me get the keys?” “Uh…nope.” If I stay, I’ll be tempted to ask her to ditch the football game to be with me. I’m definitely not ready to hear the answer to that question. Toying with her I can handle. Showing my true colors like I did the other day made me take my guard down. I’m not about to do that again. I push the door open after taking one last glance at Brittany, wondering if leaving her right now makes me an idiot, a jerk, a coward, or all of the above.

The war was, very obviously, beginning to turn against Germany as the French soldiers gained ground and started to push the retreating Nazi troops in our direction. The news was that if things got worse, the German Army would be pushed over the Vosges Mountains and back into Alsace-Lorraine. We were issued instructions from the local Nazi administration to be prepared to help these retreating soldiers and were expected to billet, feed and, if necessary, nurse those wounded back to health. “Oh my,” I thought. We had so little but it was still more than we had in Mannheim. One village woman told us, “They are our soldiers and we can jolly well care for them.” Adolph agreed with this and told me that it would be my duty to look after any German soldier that was quartered under his roof. I thought that I fully understood what he meant by this! Since I was using the entire upstairs portion of the house, I would have to make room. Looking forward to helping them, I told the girls that we were to be kind to whoever came to us. “Imagine if it was your father.” It seemed the least we could do, and I hoped that I wasn’t expected to go beyond this. Instead of improving, things just got worse. To everyone’s astonishment the school was ordered closed and we were told to attend a meeting in the Village Center. Outside of the center, amidst much commotion, a uniformed Gestapo officer standing on the back of an open truck announced that German troops would be entering our village. Soon Military vehicles and German troops seemed to be everywhere. The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a critical turning point in the European theater of World War II and we were beginning to feel the effects.