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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
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Aristotle (Metaphysics)
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I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained
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Walt Disney Company
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We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience.
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Gary L. Francione
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Navarre asserted, “We have such powerful forces and so strong a defence system that Dien Bien Phu is an impregnable fortress!” the American Lieutenant General “Iron Mike” O’Daniel also shared that opinion.
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Michael G. Kramer (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume One)
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If we would spend on education half the amount of money that we currently lavish on sports and entertainment, we could provide complete and free education for every student in this country.
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Ben Carson (Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence)
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In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
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Michael Crichton (Timeline)
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Meanwhile, the British had announced that they would leave all British bases east of Suez. That cause great concern to the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, who immediately went into discussion about this with cabinet ministers.
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Michael G. Kramer (A Gracious Enemy)
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Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads, a woman who feels too much, a woman who writes...
Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman. Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks, who knows what she knows and also knows how to fly; a woman sure of herself.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who laughs or cries making love, knows how to turn her spirit into flesh; let alone one that loves poetry (these are the most dangerous), or spends half an hour contemplating a painting and isn't able to live without music.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested in politics and is rebellious and feel a huge horror from injustice. One who does not like to watch television at all. Or a woman who is beautiful no matter the features of her face or her body.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense, entertaining, lucid and irreverent. Don’t wish to fall in love with a woman like that. Because when you fall in love with a woman like that, whether she stays with you or not, whether she loves you or not, from a woman like that, you never come back.
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Martha Rivera-Garrido
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The April forced ‘Resettlement’ of the villages of Long Phuoc, and Long Tan inflamed the already seething hatred of foreigners by the local Vietnamese people. They had only recently removed the French yoke after almost a century of cruel and repressive French rule. Now here were the Americans and their allies who in the Vietnamese eyes were continuing to do as the French had done before them. Into this sort of environment of hate, the Australian soldiers were sent to complete what the Americans had started.
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Michael G. Kramer (A Gracious Enemy)
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Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.
And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe despite the callow protestations of certain adults that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.
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Sherman Alexie
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Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.
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James Hillman (We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse)
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Thickly forested regions of Phuoc Tuy including the Rung Sat swamps and farms considered to be controlled by the Vietcong, were regularly sprayed by defoliants including “Agent Orange” using aircraft. This was both an inhumane and unsuccessful strategy which only destroyed enough food to feed 245,000 Vietnamese people for a year resulting in a propaganda gift to the Vietcong. (Ham, 2007). Given that defoliation did not uncover the enemy, who kept on fighting from jungle, caves and tunnels, the whole defoliation programme must be considered a failure. Given also, that birth defects and other health problems associated with defoliants can be directly blamed upon “Agent Orange”, it stands to reason that the allies in the Second Indochina War who sprayed it upon villages and farms can in fact be said to be, “Guilty of War Crimes!
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Michael G. Kramer (A Gracious Enemy)
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Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
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Roger Ebert
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Libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.
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Neil Gaiman (The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction)
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I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people. I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously. I don’t hold grudges, it’s not productive, but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.
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Aaron Swartz
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Tis the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
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Aristotle
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Much as a teacher may wince at the thought, he is also an entertainer—for unless he can hold his audience, he cannot really instruct or edify them.
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Sydney J. Harris
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people pay more to be entertained that educated
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Johnny Carson
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He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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Marshall McLuhan
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I was purely content to sit in the car and wander around my own mind. Watching the world itself, the people in it, and my whole internal life was more than enough to keep me entertained.
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Gabrielle Hamilton (Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef)
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So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Hocus Pocus)
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It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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He [Muhammed] is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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One of the functions of entertainment, I think, is education. - Roy E. Disney
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Newton Lee (Disney Stories: Getting to Digital)
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Reading has power. It can be education or entertainment, solace or spark, one time only or many times over.
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Bethanne Patrick (The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People)
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What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.
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Nick Hornby (Funny Girl)
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I can hardly conceive of any educated man believing in God at all without believing that God contains in Himself every perfection including eternal joy; and does not require the solar system to entertain Him like a circus.
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G.K. Chesterton (Saint Thomas Aquinas)
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Reading...
inspires,
enlightens,
nurtures,
refines,
educates,
informs,
transforms,
persuades,
challenges,
engages,
entertains,
mesmerizes,
captivates,
gratifies,
rewards,
quiets,
and calms.
Granted, it won't get the dishes done,
but sacrifices must be made.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle
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Gary John Bishop (Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life (Unfu*k Yourself series))
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Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Being able to look at and evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing one’s own life in a meaningful way. As
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Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
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Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
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Chade-Meng Tan (Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace))
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There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.
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Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
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To be educated meant you read books and entertained ideas that made you feel uncomfortable. It meant looking in the mirror and asking, What have I done that has cost me anything? What authority have I earned to speak? What work have I put in? It meant collapsing your certainties and tearing down your self-fortifications. You should feel unprotected, unarmed, open to attack.
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Michelle Kuo (Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship)
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The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)
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Philip Wylie
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That means letting them read books that are too easy for them, or too hard for them. That means letting them read books that challenge them, or do nothing but entertain them. And yes, it means letting students read books with things in them we might disagree with and letting them make up their own minds about things, which is downright scary sometimes. But that’s what good education is all about.
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Alan Gratz (Ban This Book)
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There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks? Whales are mammals, and mammals do not lay a million eggs. We were forced to give up commercial hunting and to raise domestic mammals for meat, preserving the wild ones as best we could. It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.
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Mark Kurlansky
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When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom.
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Alan Keyes
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Some printed pages are medical plasters to extract pain, others are tourists' tickets out of boredom or loneliness to exhilarating adventures, still others are diplomas for promotion and drilling ideas into a quick-step.
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Molly Guptill Manning (When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II)
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...friendship stands as a small affront to the total control of all things by mass entertainment and mass media and mass education and mass politics. For wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal. For you look at the friend and you remember the past, and treasure it. You love the friend, and suddenly you understand that this life of ours cannot fully be described by the motion of particulate matter in empty space. You see instantly that politics fades into unimportance, with all its noisy glamour and empty promises. You feel that others before you have known what it is to have the true friend, the one before whom you can, as Cicero put it, think out loud. You feel that, and it is like an earnest of eternity, of being grounded in a a love and beauty and goodness that is at the heart of all ages, and that transcends them all. Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers, aplenty. But not friends.
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Anthony Esolen (Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child)
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...the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.
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Neal Gabler (Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality)
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Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities.
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Northrop Frye (The Educated Imagination (Midland Book))
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They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass ... and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he was fast asleep). He greeted them with the utmost courtesy. He addressed them all as Kochamma [an honorific title for a woman] and gave them fresh coconut water to drink. He chatted to them about the weather. The river. The fact that in his opinion coconut trees were getting shorter by the year. As were the ladies in Ayemenem. He introduced them to his surly hen. He showed them his carpentry tools, and whittled them each a little wooden spoon.
It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. [emphasis mine]
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.
To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
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Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
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We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment…To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.
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Hannah Arendt (Between Past and Future)
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What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
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Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education)
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Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism.
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Thomas C. Foster (How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines)
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Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
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Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
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In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.
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Maxwell King (The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers)
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Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.
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Benjamin P. Hardy (How to Consciously Design Your Ideal Future)
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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ― Aristotle, Metaphysics
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Penny Reid (Beard in Mind (Winston Brothers, #4))
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One can be both entertained and educated and not know the difference”.
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Mark Twain
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A wealthy mindset minimizes expenses in self-entertainment and maximizes investments in self-education.
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Orrin Woodward
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There were no musicians or dancers, for Plato believed that educated men ought to be capable of entertaining themselves by "speaking and listening in turns in an orderly manner.
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Tom Standage (A History of the World in 6 Glasses)
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Let your fuel be Education rather than Entertainment.
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Dhaval Gajera
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Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties. Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.
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Mary Oliver (Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems)
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I follow the course marked out by my principles and, what is more, enjoy a deep and noble pleasure in following it. You deeply despise the human race, at least our part of it; you think it not only fallen but incapable of ever rising again... For my part, as I feel neither the right nor the wish to entertain such opinions of my species and my country, I think it is not necessary to despair of them. In my opinion, human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty...And God forbid that my mind should ever be crossed by the thought that it is necessary to despair of success... You will allow me to have less confidence in your teaching than in the goodness and justice of God.
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Alexis de Tocqueville
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#TeamLightSkin vs. #TeamDarkSkin… REALLY, are you serious? To the black females that participate in this garbage, shame on you! Yes, I said it and I won’t take it back. After all that we’ve been through as a race regarding the light-skinned niggers versus the dark-skinned niggers, you’re actually keeping this garbage up? It’s time to wake up my Beautiful Black Queens! Educate yourself and know your history. This shouldn’t be something that we’re entertaining. WE are #TeamMelanin! Period. Enough of the foolishness! Respect yourself. Respect our race. We should be building one another up, not tearing each other down. Melanin is Exquisite Beauty in EVERY shade. Together, WE are strong, unstoppable, and powerful. Enough is enough! I encourage you to stop participating in things that keep us divided. Real Talk!
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Stephanie Lahart
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By the time they're in college, it's gone too far. They've had twelve years without disciplined learning and they don't know how to apply themselves. They haven't learned to study or to pace their work so that projects get completed on time. They fall asleep in lectures because they expect to be entertained not educated.
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Lois Duncan (Killing Mr. Griffin)
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The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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Books are silent friends, and should be treated well. I am proud of my books. I hope that my children will use them and preserve them when I am gone from this world. Human friends may betray you, but not so with books. Books contain wisdom for our understanding, humour for our entertainment, information for our development, and matter for our pleasure.
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Brenda C. Mohammed (Memoirs of Dr Andrew Moonir Khan - A great Educator In Trinidad and Tobago)
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Black anti-semitism is a form of underdog resentment and envy, directed at another underdog who has made it in American society. The remarkable upward mobility of American Jews--rooted chiefly in a history and culture that places a premium on higher education and self-organization--easily lends itself to myths of Jewish unity and homogeneity that have gained currency among other groups, especially among relatively unorganized groups like black Americans. The high visibility of Jews in the upper reaches of the academy, journalism, the entertainment industry, and the professions--though less so percentage-wise in corporate America and national political office--is viewed less as a result of hard work and success fairly won and more as a matter of favoritism and nepotism among Jews. Ironically, calls for black solidarity and achievement are often modeled on myths of Jewish unity--as both groups respond to American xenophobia and racism. But in times such as these, some blacks view Jews as obstacles rather than allies in the struggle for racial justice.
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Cornel West
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Many people don’t question the “norm.” But vibrating higher daily will mean questioning such things as the quality of the education system, the entertainment industry, social media, the food system, and all the things that influence society—and you—every day. Raising the vibration of who and what influences society brings about a better world for all. This
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Lalah Delia (Vibrate Higher Daily: Live Your Power)
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Being born is like coming into the middle of a movie. You have to find out what happened before you arrived and catch up to where you are now.
Everybody has a life, but the true gift lies in the ability to express that "life force" in a way that is thought provoking, entertaining, inspiring and educational to anyone who might see that life. This life then becomes more--it becomes art.
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Cheryl Waiters
“
Writers write for various reasons: To educate, to promote a cause, to entertain, to garner emotion, and for myriad reasons that only each writer can uniquely demonstrate. Poe had a unique gift for writing that delivered a moral message with a twist of the macabre.
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SUSAN Marie MOLLOY (Two Invitations into Poe's Macabre Funhouse: An Interpretation of "The Masque of the Red Death")
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The elderly are the most entertaining people in the world,” she eventually told Irina. “They have lived a lot, say whatever they like, and couldn’t care less about other people’s opinion. You’ll never get bored here. Our residents are well educated, and if they’re in good health they keep on learning and experimenting. This community stimulates them and they can avoid the worst scourge of old age: loneliness.” Irina
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Isabel Allende (The Japanese Lover)
“
The fact is that men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed; and in bad faith they use it as a pretext to declare that woman wanted the destiny they imposed on her. We have seen that in reality her whole education conspires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure; all of society - beginning with her respected parents - lies to her in extolling the high value of love, devotion, and the gift of self and in concealing the fact that neither lover, husband nor children will be disposed to bear the burdensome responsibility of it. She cheerfully accepts these lies because they invite her to take the easy slope: and that is the worst of the crimes committed against her; from her childhood and throughout her life, she is spoiled, she is corrupted by the fact that this resignation, tempting to any existent anxious about her freedom, is mean to be her vocation; if one encourages a child to be lazy by entertaining him all day, without giving him the occasion to study, without showing him its value, no one will say when he reaches the age of man that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; this is how the woman is raised, without ever being taught the necessity of assuming her own existence; she readily lets herself count on the protection, love, help and guidance of others; she lets herself be fascinated by the hope of being able to realise her being without doing anything. She is wrong to yield to this temptation; but the man is ill advised to reproach her for it since it is he himself who tempted her.
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Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
“
If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to-- Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
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Jane Austen
“
The political merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this purpose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully selected samples of the electorate are given "interviews in depth." These interviews in depth reveal the unconscious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given society at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look "sincere." Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter.
In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to concentrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most -- and preferably (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to over-simplify complex issues. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.
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Aldous Huxley
“
In many ways politics follows culture. As ancient Greek musician Damon of Athens said, ‘Show me the lyric of a nation and it matters not who writes its laws.’ Movies, television, books, magazines, the Internet, and music are incredibly significant in shaping world views and lifestyles of today's America. And Christians are expressing a growing awareness and response to these avenues of influence. Where is God calling you to serve him – media, arts and entertainment, politics, education, church, business, science?
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David Kinnaman (unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters)
“
Comedy, much of the time, is built on disorder. Comedy is intoxicating to a young mind in distress. You see these famous people pointing out the ridiculousness of a world that you’ve never been able to make sense of. Comedians offer the hope, the chance, however slim, that it’s not you that’s broken but the world. And they dress up in cool clothes! And hang out with various late-night hosts named Jimmy! And they make people laugh, and those people then love them. I can’t say for certain that depression leads people to a career in comedy, but it seems like the path is smoothly paved and well lit.
Comedian Solomon Georgio came to the United States as a refugee from Ethiopia when he was three years old, and his family relied on comedy early on for entertainment and education. “We all loved comedy because that’s one of the few things that we comprehended when we didn’t speak the language,” he says. “Surprisingly, standup comedy, too, which, even though we didn’t know what was going on, you kind of see a rhythm and you know people are being entertained and laughing along. So we watched a lot of old television. Three Stooges, I Love Lucy, and, like, slapstick. We just immediately started watching and enjoying. So you can only imagine how disappointed I was when I met my first white person in real life and I was like, ‘Oh, you’re not like the Three Stooges. I can’t slap you and poke you in the eye. You guys aren’t doing any of that stuff out here. Okay.
”
”
John Moe (The Hilarious World of Depression)
“
One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures. We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying. Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, “a desire for a desire,” when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires. Acquiring the tastes of a serious person is what we call education. Does it have a future? The advent of engineered, hyperpalatable mental stimuli compels us to ask the question.
”
”
Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction)
“
Absolutely love this particular excerpt: "Books are silent friends, and should be treated well. I am proud of my books. I hope that my children will use them and preserve them when I am gone from this world. Human friends may betray you, but not so with books. Books contain wisdom for our understanding, humour for our entertainment, information for our development, and matter for our pleasure.
”
”
Brenda C. Mohammed (Memoirs of Dr Andrew Moonir Khan - A great Educator In Trinidad and Tobago)
“
Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration. Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords. All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks.
Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds.
My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the country where they were in short supply.
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for ‘Gatling gun’ literally translates into ‘mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?’ The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it’s quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.
”
”
Stephen Hunter (I, Ripper: A Novel)
“
Romano Guardini, surveying the moral and intellectual ruin that was Europe after the Second World War, wrote that we had entered the era of “mass man,” that the individual was being submerged beneath phenomena of the masses, which did not rise to the status of a true culture. Mass man has no culture, no real home, no transcendent object of devotion, no aim but what is given to him in and through mass education, mass entertainment, and mass politics. He floats on the seas willy-nilly, like a jellyfish, without a mind and a North Star to guide him. He gives in, he goes along. He lives, easily and uneventfully, Life Under Compulsion. Submerged
”
”
Anthony Esolen (Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child)
“
I wouldn’t say so. I’ve told people I’m a medieval historian when asked what I do. It freezes conversation. If one tells them one’s a poet, one gets these odd looks which seem to say, “Well, what’s he living off?” In the old days a man was proud to have in his passport, Occupation: Gentleman. Lord Antrim’s passport simply said, Occupation: Peer—which I felt was correct. I’ve had a lucky life. I had a happy home, and my parents provided me with a good education. And my father was both a physician and a scholar, so I never got the idea that art and science were opposing cultures—both were entertained equally in my home. I cannot complain. I’ve never had to do anything I really disliked. Certainly I’ve had to do various jobs I would not have taken on if I’d had the money; but I’ve always considered myself a worker, not a laborer. So many people have jobs they don’t like at all. I haven’t, and I’m grateful for that.
”
”
W.H. Auden
“
Jesus had no money,
but was the richest of all time;
had no education,
but was the smartest of all time;
had no titles,
but was the noblest of all time;
had no pedigree,
but was the finest of all time;
and had no power,
but was the strongest of all time.
He had no wife,
but was the meekest husband of all time;
had no children,
but was the gentlest father of all time;
had no teacher,
but was the humblest pupil of all time;
had no schooling,
but was the wisest teacher of all time;
and had no temple,
but was the godliest rabbi of all time.
He had no sword,
but was the bravest warrior of all time;
had no boat,
but was the shrewdest fisherman of all time;
had no winery,
but was the aptest winemaker of all time;
had no mentor,
but was the nicest counselor of all time;
and had no pen,
but was the greatest author of all time.
He had no seminary,
but was the sharpest theologian of all time;
had no university,
but was the brightest professor of all time;
had no degree,
but was the ablest doctor of all time;
had no wealth,
but was the biggest philanthropist of all time;
and had no stage,
but was the grandest entertainer of all time.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
People with an entertaining rigid structure are brought up in environments in which the parents are uncomfortable with expressing feelings. This is not to say that the parents do not care, but they do not express feelings like affection, warmth, and caring or feel comfortable with expressing such feelings (Keleman). The experience within the family is not one of intimacy and true interchange of feeling. To contend with the situation, the child may learn to draw out the parents by being cute, entertaining, or charming. Although being charming is something most children do naturally to some extent, the difference in the case of people with an entertaining rigid structure is that this becomes the primary mode of relating.
Furthermore, the entertaining rigid structure pattern is reinforced as the parents respond primarily to the child's charm, rather than to their own feelings. Therefore, such children effectively learn that they will not get the reaction they crave without using that behavior. At the same time, these children are also developing or have developed a discomfort with intimacy that is similar to that of their parents. As a result, people with an entertaining rigid structure as adults act out this pattern in which they are energized or emotionally fed by being able to cause another person to be attracted to them, but they become anxious if the person becomes too close or expresses "real" feeling. Love is what they are really craving, and they think they are getting it, but are not. In other words, they have mistaken the energy of attraction for love.
”
”
Elliot Greene (The Psychology of the Body (Lww Massage Therapy & Bodywork Educational Series))
“
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern," and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.
”
”
Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
“
Rooster here has missed Ned a few times himself, horse and all,' said the captain. 'I reckon his is on his way now to missing him again.'
Rooster was holding a bottle with a little whiskey in it. He said, 'You keep on thinking that.' He drained off the whiskey in about three swallows and tapped the cork back in and tossed the bottle up in the air. He pulled his revolver and fired at it twice and missed. The bottle fell and rolled and Rooster shot at it two or three more times and broke it on the ground. He got out his sack of cartridges and reloaded his pistol. He said, 'The Chinaman is running them cheap shells in on me again.'
LaBoeuf said, 'I thought maybe the sun was in your eyes. That is to say, your eye.'
Rooster swung the cylinder back in his revolver and said, 'Eyes, is it? I'll show you eyes!' He jerked the sack of corn dodgers free from his saddle baggage. He got one of the dodgers out and flung it in the air and fired at it and missed. Then he flung another one up and he hit it. The corn dodger exploded. He was pleased with himself and he got a fresh bottle of whiskey from his baggage and treated himself to a drink.
LaBoeuf pulled one of his revolvers and got two dodgers out of the sack and tossed them both up. He fired very rapidly but he only hit one. Captain Finch tried it with two and missed both of them. Then he tried with one and made a successful shot. Rooster shot at two and hit one. They drank whiskey and used up about sixty corn dodgers like that. None of them ever hit two at one throw with a revolver but Captain Finch finally did it with his Winchester repeating rifle, with somebody else throwing. It was entertaining for a while but there was nothing educational about it. I grew more and more impatient with them.
I said, 'Come on, I have had my bait of this. I am ready to go. Shooting cornbread out here on this prairie is not taking us anywhere.'
By then Rooster was using his rifle and the captain was throwing for him. 'Chunk high and not so far out this time,' said he.
”
”
Charles Portis (True Grit)
“
The result will not be an Orwellian police state. We always prepare ourselves for the previous enemy, even when we face an altogether new menace. Defenders of human individuality stand guard against the tyranny of the collective, without realising that human individuality is now threatened from the opposite direction. The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within. Today corporations and governments pay homage to my individuality, and promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customised to my unique needs and wishes. But in order to so, corporations and governments first need to break me up into biochemical subsystems, monitor these subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms. In the process, the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy. Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Let us live, therefore, cheerfully, although there be no lasting joy in mortal things, whose substance is evanescent, inane, and vacuous. But if there is any good thing by which you would adorn this stage of life, we have not of such been cheated - rest, serenity, modesty, self-restraint, orderliness, change, fun, entertainment, society, temperance, sleep, food, drink, riding, sailing, walking, keeping abreast of events, meditation, contemplation, education, piety, marriage, feasting, the satisfaction of recalling an orderly disposition of the past, cleanliness, water, fire, listening to music, looking at all about one, talks, stories, history, liberty, continence, little birds, puppies, cats, consolation of death, and the common flux of time, fate and fortune, over the afflicted and the favoured alike. There is a good hope for things beyond all hope; good in the exercise of some art in which one is skilled; good in meditating upon the manifold transmutation of all nature and upon the magnitude of Earth.
”
”
Girolamo Cardano
“
From our earliest days, education has been a hallmark of our company. It was Walt himself who said, “We have always tried to be guided by the basic idea that, in the discovery of knowledge, there is great entertainment—as, conversely, in all good entertainment, there is always some grain of wisdom, humanity, or enlightenment to be gained.
”
”
Theodore Kinni (Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service)
“
This book will take you into a world far more wonderful than the world of work and entertainment. At university I try to make converts by assigning works of literature that shed light on human psychology, history or philosophy. Some students respond by asking me to give them lists of books. Well, here is your list. But I also want to make converts of those who have not yet gone or will never go to university. The educational establishment may ignore you but I will not. I remember my own family and how they educated themselves. Many in my running club have never been to university. Some of them are among the most intelligent and intellectually curious people I know. Some of them are better informed than university students about almost everything, except the narrow knowledge a graduate gets from majoring in physics or commerce or engineering. Some of my running companions know who Hitler was. As for my students, I once set an exam question about tyranny in the twentieth century. Only a few students could volunteer Hitler’s name.
”
”
James R. Flynn (The Torchlight List: Around the World in 200 Books)
“
The clever seek comfort,
the wise seek peace.
The clever seek pleasure,
the wise seek contentment.
The clever seek riches,
the wise seek happiness.
The clever seek laughter,
the wise seek joy.
The clever seek company,
the wise seek comrades.
The clever seek crowds,
the wise seek friends.
The clever seek approval,
the wise seek respect.
The clever seek fame,
the wise seek reverence.
The clever seek acquaintances,
the wise seek allies.
The clever seek accomplices,
the wise seek helpers.
The clever seek associates,
the wise seek partners.
The clever seek connections,
the wise seek mentors.
The clever seek accolades,
the wise seek excellence.
The clever seek recognition,
the wise seek awards.
The clever seek prominence,
the wise seek followers.
The clever seek leadership,
the wise seek impact.
The clever seek power,
the wise seek influence.
The clever seek titles,
the wise seek respect.
The clever seek fame,
the wise seek dignity.
The clever seek glory,
the wise seek integrity.
The clever seek wants,
the wise seek needs.
The clever seek luxury,
the wise seek convenience.
The clever seek enjoyment,
the wise seek fulfillment.
The clever seek entertainment,
the wise seek rest.
The clever seek style,
the wise seek grace.
The clever seek brains,
the wise seek heart.
The clever seek appearance,
the wise seek etiquette.
The clever seek beauty,
the wise seek honesty.
The clever seek opinions,
the wise seek facts.
The clever seek truth,
the wise seek knowledge.
The clever seek ideas,
the wise seek wisdom.
The clever seek adventure,
the wise seek discovery.
The clever seek questions,
the wise seek answers.
The clever seek problems,
the wise seek solutions.
The clever seek amusement,
the wise seek books.
The clever seek an education,
the wise seek enlightenment.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as background for democratic deliberation. In such a situation, citizens have no choice but to look for markers to follow other than truth or reliability. What happens in such cases, as we see across the world, is that citizens look to politics for tribal identifications, for addressing personal grievances, and for entertainment. When news becomes sports, the strongman achieves a certain measure of popularity. Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.
”
”
Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
“
A best-selling “pocket book,” published in London, was widely read in the American colonies in the 1700s. It was called Advice to a Daughter: You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in Sexes, and that for the better Oeconomy of the World; the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow’d upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar’d for the Compliance that is necessary for the performance of those Duties which seem’d to be most properly assign’d to it. . . . Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection: Ours wanteth your Gentleness to soften, and to entertain us. . . . Against this powerful education, it is remarkable that women nevertheless rebelled.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
BODY - cultural tendency: maintain lifestyle; treat health problems with surgery and medication / Principle; prevent diseases and problems by aligning lifestyle to be in harmony with established, universally accepted principles of health.
MIND - cultural tendency: watch television: ‘entertain me’ / Principles: read broadly and deeply, continuous education
HEART - cultural tendency - use relationships with others to forward your personal, selfish interests / principle: deep, respectful listening and serving others brings greatest fulfilment and joy
SPIRIT - cultural tendency - succumb to growing secularism and cynicism / principle - recognise that the source of our basic need for meaning and of the positive things we seek in life is principles - which natural laws I personally believe to have their source in God.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
(...) How many ladies have there been, and still are, who deserve place among the learned; and who are more capable of teaching the sciences than those who now fill most of the university chairs? The age we live in has produced as many, as any heretofore (...) And as our sex, when it applies to learning, may be said at least to keep pace with the Men, so are they more to be esteem'd for their learning than the latter: Since they are under a necessity of surmounting the softness they were educated in (...) to which cruel custom seem'd to condemn them; to overcome the external impediments in their way to study; and to conquer the disadvantageous notions, which the vulgar of both sexes entertain of learning in Women. (...) it is self-evident, that many of our sex have far outstript the Men. Why then are we not as fit to learn and teach the sciences, at least to our own sex, as they fancy themselves to be?
”
”
Sophia Fermor (Woman Not Inferior to Man)
“
A properly functioning system of indoctrination has a variety of tasks, some rather delicate. One of its targets is the stupid and ignorant masses. They must be kept that way, diverted with emotionally potent oversimplifications, marginalized, and isolated. Ideally, each person should be alone in front of the TV screen watching sports, soap operas, or comedies, deprived of organizational structures that permit individuals lacking resources to discover what they think and believe in interaction with others, to formulate their own concerns and programs, and to act to realize them. They can then be permitted, even encouraged, to ratify the decisions made by their betters in periodic elections. The "rascal multitude" are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
“
There are also generational knowledges in play, accessed and skilled within a history of televisual experiments in educational entertainment. For US academics schooled in the fifties, sixties, and seventies some old TV shows haunt this vignette as well. Two are Walter Cronkite’s You Are There (CBS, 1953–57) and Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds (PBS, 1977–81). During the mid-century decades either or both could be found on the TV screen and in US secondary school classrooms. Even now the thoughtfully presentist You are There reenactments can be viewed on DVDs from Netflix; you can be personally addressed and included as Cronkite interviews Socrates about his choice to poison himself with hemlock rather than submit to exile after ostracism in ancient Athens. Cronkite’s interviews, scripted by blacklisted Hollywood writers, were specifically charged with messages against McCarthy-style witch hunts that were “felt” rather than spoken out.
”
”
Katie King (Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell)
“
WHAT EES ALL DEES STUFF? IN AFRICA WE DOAN HAVE ALL DEES STUFF!! WE HAVE DEE BABEE!!!"
His message was simple. It goes to the heart of what we in HypnoBirthing frequently puzzle over: Why has all the "stuff" that denies the normalcy of birth and portrays it as an inevitably risky and dangerous medical event become a routine part of most childbirth education classes? Why are couples in a low- or no-risk category being prepared for circumstances that only rarely occur? Even more puzzling, why do parents accept the negative premise that birth is a dangerous, painful ordeal at best or a medical calamity at worst? Why do they blindly accept the "one-size-fits-all" approach?"
If what couples are hearing in childbirth classes is far removed from what they want their birthing experiences to be, why do they spend so much time entertaining negative outcomes that can color and shape their birth expectations and ultimately affect their birth experience? In other words, if it's not what they're wanting, why would they "go there"? In HypnoBirthing, we doan have all dees stuff, and deliberately so."
HypnoBirthing helps you to frame a positive expectation and to prepare for birth by developing a trust and belief in your birthing body and in nature's undeniable orchestration of birthing. By teaching you the basic physiology of birth and explaining the adverse effect that fear has upon the chemical and physiological responses of your body we help you to learn simple, self-conditioning techniques that will easily bring you into the optimal state of relaxation you will use during birthing. This will allow your birthing muscles to fully relax. In other words, we will help you prepare for the birth your plan and want for yourselves and your baby, rather than the birth that someone else directs. We will help you look forward to your pregnancy and birthing with joy and love, rather than fear and anxiety.
”
”
Marie F. Mongan (HypnoBirthing: The Mongan Method)
“
People that think are many,
people that reason are few.
People that theorize are many,
people that prove are few.
People that speculate are many,
people that know are few.
People that assume are many,
people that verify are few.
People that hear are many,
people that listen are few.
People that preach are many,
people that practice are few.
People that see are many,
people that observe are few.
People that recall are many,
people that comprehend are few.
People that question are many,
people that answer are few.
People that entertain are many,
people that educate are few.
People that misguide are many,
people that enlighten are few.
People that lecture are many,
people that demonstrate are few.
People that start are many,
people that finish are few.
People that quit are many,
people that persevere are few.
People that fall are many,
people that rise are few.
People that compete are many,
people that win are few.
People that criticize are many,
people that inspire are few.
People that blame are many,
people that pardon are few.
People that condemn are many,
people that console are few.
People that undermine are many,
people that strengthen are few.
People that take are many,
people that give are few.
People that teach are many,
people that mentor are few.
People that harm are many,
people that heal are few.
People that doubt are many,
people that believe are few.
People that wish are many,
people that strive are few.
People that plan are many,
people that prevail are few.
People that lose are many,
people that gain are few.
People that fail are many,
people that succeed are few.
People that imitate are many,
people that originate are few.
People that innovate are many,
people that invent are few.
People that conceive are many,
people that realize are few.
People that dream are many,
people that achieve are few.
People that divide are many,
people that unify are few.
People that follow are many,
people that lead are few.
People that command are many,
people that influence are few.
People that control are many,
people that guide are few.
People that feel are many,
people that empathize are few.
People that yearn are many,
people that fulfill are few.
People that trust are many,
people that are devoted are few.
People that age are many,
people that mature are few.
People that rage are many,
people that forgive are few.
People that despair are many,
people that hope are few.
People that fear are many,
people that love are few.
People that curse are many,
people that bless are few.
”
”
Matshona Dhliwayo
“
To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern," and a prerequisite for demanding traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.
”
”
Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
“
If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.
”
”
David Hume
“
Here’s the thing, people: We have some serious problems. The lights are off. And it seems like that’s affecting the water flow in part of town. So, no baths or showers, okay? But the situation is that we think Caine is short of food, which means he’s not going to be able to hold out very long at the power plant.”
“How long?” someone yelled.
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Why can’t you get him to leave?”
“Because I can’t, that’s why,” Sam snapped, letting some of his anger show. “Because I’m not Superman, all right? Look, he’s inside the plant. The walls are thick. He has guns, he has Jack, he has Drake, and he has his own powers. I can’t get him out of there without getting some of our people killed. Anybody want to volunteer for that?"
Silence.
“Yeah, I thought so. I can’t get you people to show up and pick melons, let alone throw down with Drake.”
“That’s your job,” Zil said.
“Oh, I see,” Sam said. The resentment he’d held in now came boiling to the surface. “It’s my job to pick the fruit, and collect the trash, and ration the food, and catch Hunter, and stop Caine, and settle every stupid little fight, and make sure kids get a visit from the Tooth Fairy. What’s your job, Zil? Oh, right: you spray hateful graffiti. Thanks for taking care of that, I don’t know how we’d ever manage without you.”
“Sam…,” Astrid said, just loud enough for him to hear. A warning.
Too late. He was going to say what needed saying.
“And the rest of you. How many of you have done a single, lousy thing in the last two weeks aside from sitting around playing Xbox or watching movies?
“Let me explain something to you people. I’m not your parents. I’m a fifteen-year-old kid. I’m a kid, just like all of you. I don’t happen to have any magic ability to make food suddenly appear. I can’t just snap my fingers and make all your problems go away. I’m just a kid.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he had crossed the line. He had said the fateful words so many had used as an excuse before him. How many hundreds of times had he heard, “I’m just a kid.”
But now he seemed unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “Look, I have an eighth-grade education. Just because I have powers doesn’t mean I’m Dumbledore or George Washington or Martin Luther King. Until all this happened I was just a B student. All I wanted to do was surf. I wanted to grow up to be Dru Adler or Kelly Slater, just, you know, a really good surfer.”
The crowd was dead quiet now. Of course they were quiet, some still-functioning part of his mind thought bitterly, it’s entertaining watching someone melt down in public.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Sam said.
“I lost people today…I…I screwed up. I should have figured out Caine might go after the power plant.”
Silence.
“I’m doing the best I can.”
No one said a word.
Sam refused to meet Astrid’s eyes. If he saw pity there, he would fall apart completely.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry.
”
”
Michael Grant (Hunger (Gone, #2))
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WE LIVE IN AN age of nontraditional ladder climbing. Not just in politics, but in business and personal development and education and entertainment and innovation. Traditional paths are not just slow; they’re no longer viable if we want to compete and innovate. That’s great news, because throwing out the dues paradigm leads us toward meritocracy. But to be successful, we need to start thinking more like hackers, acting more like entrepreneurs. We have to work smarter, not just harder. We’ll see throughout the following chapters how Sinatra-style credibility and ladder switching—always parlaying for something more—are the foundation for how the most interesting people and companies in the world succeed. It’s not just how presidents get to the top. It’s how CEOs and comedians and racecar drivers hone their skills and make it in the big leagues. It’s how new businesses grow fast, and old businesses grow faster. It’s how entrepreneurs create life-changing products in record time and inventors parlay dreams for bigger dreams. Hacking the ladder is the mind-set they use to get places. The rest of this book is about becoming good enough to deserve it.
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Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
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When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote:
"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth.
I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America.
I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America.
I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America.
I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America.
I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America.
I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America.
I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America.
I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America.
I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America.
These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions.
And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life.
Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17
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Dan Rather
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Fine art galleries are the excellent setups for exhibiting art, generally aesthetic art such as paints, sculptures, and digital photography. Basically, art galleries showcase a range of art designs featuring contemporary and traditional fine art, glass fine art, art prints, and animation fine art. Fine art galleries are dedicated to the advertising of arising artists. These galleries supply a system for them to present their jobs together with the works of across the country and internationally popular artists.
The UNITED STATE has a wealth of famous art galleries. Lots of villages in the U.S. show off an art gallery. The High Museum of Fine art, Alleged Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, National Gallery of Art Gallery, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Agora Gallery, Rosalux Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, The Alaska House Gallery, and Anchorage Gallery of History and Art are some of the renowned fine art galleries in the United States. Today, there are on the internet fine art galleries showing initial artwork.
Several famous fine art galleries show regional pieces of art such as African fine art, American art, Indian fine art, and European art, in addition to individual fine art, modern-day and modern fine art, and digital photography. These galleries collect, show, and keep the masterpieces for the coming generations. Many famous art galleries try to entertain and educate their local, nationwide, and international audiences. Some renowned fine art galleries focus on specific areas such as pictures. A great variety of well-known fine art galleries are had and run by government.
The majority of famous fine art galleries supply an opportunity for site visitors to buy outstanding art work. Additionally, they organize many art-related tasks such as songs shows and verse readings for kids and grownups. Art galleries organize seminars and workshops conducted by prominent artists. Committed to quality in both art and solution, most well-known fine art galleries provide you a rich, exceptional experience. If you wish to read additional information, please visit this site
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Famous Art Galleries