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The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.
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Malcolm X (Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements)
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To those of us who often procrastinate on the decision we feel intimidated by lack of education or any area of weakness. I relieve you with this statement: It is not how much you know that arms you with the tools of great decision making, but rather how much you ask. Ask questions.
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T.D. Jakes (Making Great Decisions Reflections)
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Veganism is an act of nonviolent defiance. It is our statement that we reject the notion that animals are things and that we regard sentient nonhumans as moral persons with the fundamental moral right not to be treated as the property or resources of humans.
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Gary L. Francione
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Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global "connectitude." (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)
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Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
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The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality
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Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
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...those in power often invoke civility to punish speech they dislike, but overlook the equally acid-tongued statements that are in agreement with their own assumptions.
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Greg Lukianoff (Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate)
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She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty.
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Laura Kalpakian (Educating Waverley)
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Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom the scientific statements refer.
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C.G. Jung (The Undiscovered Self)
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A life with simplicity and joy is the best statement of success.
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Debasish Mridha
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When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.
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Dean Koontz (Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1))
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They warn that any effort to put two objects in the same place at the same time will have catastrophic consequences. When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.
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Dean Koontz (Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1))
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We say easily, for instance, ‘The ignorant ought not to vote.’ We would say, ‘No civilized state should have citizens too ignorant to participate in government,’ and this statement is but a step to the fact: that no state is civilized which has citizens too ignorant to help rule it.
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W.E.B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Dover Literature: African American))
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A fool will always rely on what someone else says, however an intelligent person would use critical thinking to justify the rationality of statements made by others before embracing their influence.
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Saaif Alam
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Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.
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Iain Pears (The Dream of Scipio)
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Four Millions of people heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land, not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so, voters in every part of the land, the right not to be abridged by any state, is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day . . . The adoption of the 15th Amendment . . . constitutes the most important event that has occurred, since the nation came into life.” It was a stunning statement of Grant’s faith in the new black electorate. He further urged Congress to promote popular education so that “all who possess and exercise political rights, shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the government a blessing.
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Ron Chernow (Grant)
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Social stupidity continues in the twenty-first century. In 2005, for example, the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” Twenty-seven percent of Democrats also agreed. Such responses can only come from people who have neither had a conversation with a poor person nor imagined their economic and social reality—yet somehow imagine they know enough to hold an opinion. Educated people are more likely to venture such ill-informed opinions.
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James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
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The third question, thankfully, was less emotional. It read: “What is wrong with this statement?” How funny, Reynie thought, and marking down his answer he felt somewhat cheered. “It isn’t a statement at all,” he wrote. “It’s a question.
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Trenton Lee Stewart (The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict (The Mysterious Benedict Society, #0))
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In these cases, the mind knows what it's doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind stride but the guile limps. And that's no guileless statement, however, and that's no Harvard like, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data.
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Jack Kerouac (Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46)
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I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.
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Margaret George (Elizabeth I)
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We don’t simply say something that’s untrue. We make statements so insane that there’s no possible intelligent response. Like arguing with some old fart in a rocking chair who claims we never landed on the moon. Any educated person can only laugh. Meanwhile, we’ve just won over all the non-moon-landing votes.
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Tim Dorsey (Pineapple Grenade (Serge Storms #15))
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Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.
In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.
Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.
This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.
The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.
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Christopher Michael Langan
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Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?
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Jeanette Winterson (Art and Lies)
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I don't know why I always felt the need to educate my friends when I learned some new bit of information most of the rest of the world didn't know, such as the secret existence of Jesus' older, smarter brother, or, later, that you could crawl into our coal furnace and freeze or that the water coming out of our C tap was actually warm. But I did, and ended up on the wooden bench outside Mr. Mautz's Sunday school classroom the very next Sunday for what would become the first in a long string of blasphemous statements.
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Chris Crutcher
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Not all statements that are truthful are useful.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.
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Henry Hitchings
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The Los Angeles Public Library provides free and easy access to information, ideas, books and technology that enrich, educate and empower every individual in our city's diverse communities.
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Los Angeles Public Library Mission Statement
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I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If the old priests forced a statement on mankind, at least they previously took some trouble to make it lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute for a doctrine without even stating it.
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G.K. Chesterton (Heretics)
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The type of statements to avoid are indirect, open-ended suggestions, especially about feeling, and truisms or platitudes. Such statements induce a stuck feeling in clients with a compressed structure. They are inwardly trying to achieve the attitudes or actions suggested by the statements and simultaneously resisting and resenting them, while also feeling humiliated by the expectations implied in the statements and shameful of their resistance all at the same time. This reveals why the best intentioned therapist can end up with a client who makes little progress, seems bogged down, and makes the therapist feel ineffective.
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Elliot Greene (The Psychology of the Body (Lww Massage Therapy & Bodywork Educational Series))
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He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education and, even more amazing, no superiority complex since he had succeeded despite that lack. He would say often, "I been to school three years in my life. In Slaten, Texas, times was hard, and I had to help my daddy on the farm."
No recriminations lay hidden under the plain statement, nor was there boasting when he said, "If I'm living a little better now, it's because I treats everybody right.
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Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
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And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.
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Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud (Knowledge, Language, Thought and The Civilization of Islam: Essays in Honor of Syed Muhammad Naquib al–Attas)
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Much of the control exerted by the caregiver is accomplished through being indirect, such as implying expectations. The caregiver may tell the child what the child feels and thinks, particularly when he or she is upset or angry. "You don't really feel that way, do you?" is a phrase heard often in the families of people with a compressed structure. Statements like, "You want to play the piano for Aunt Martha, don't you?" are used to get the child to do what the caregiver wants without directly asking the child what he wants or not leaving the child any room to say no. The caregiver may act in a way that assumes the child feels as the caregiver feels, as if the child were an extension of the caregiver, by saying, for example, "I'm cold, put on your sweater." Children growing up in this situation become so well attuned to the feelings and will of the caregiver that the caregiver may eventually need only to shiver a little for the child to go to get a sweater for both of them.
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Elliot Greene (The Psychology of the Body (Lww Massage Therapy & Bodywork Educational Series))
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Well, er…it’s…well, it’s…it’s symbolic, Archchancellor.” “Ah?” The Senior Wrangler felt that something more was expected. He groped around in the dusty attics of his education. “Of…the leaves, d’y’see…they’re symbolic of…of green, d’y’see, whereas the berries, in fact, yes, the berries symbolize…symbolize white. Yes. White and green. Very…symbolic.” He waited. He was not, unfortunately, disappointed. “What of?” The Senior Wrangler coughed. “I’m not sure there has to be an of,” he said. “Ah? So,” said the Archchancellor, thoughtfully, “it could be said that the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?” “Yes, indeed,” said the Senior Wrangler. “So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?” “Exactly, Archchancellor,” said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just hanging on. “Funny thing, that,” said Ridcully, in the same thoughtful tone of voice. “That statement is either so deep it would take a lifetime to fully comprehend every particle of its meaning, or it is a load of absolute tosh. Which is it, I wonder?
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Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20))
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I am not interested in love that is aloof. In a love that refuses hard work, instead demanding a bite-size education that doesn’t transform anything. In a love that qualifies the statement “Black lives matter,” because it is unconvinced this is true. I am not interested in a love that refuses to see systems and structures of injustice, preferring to ask itself only about personal intentions. This aloof kind of love is useless to me. I need a love that is troubled by injustice. A love that is provoked to anger when Black folks, including our children, lie dead in the streets. A love that can no longer be concerned with tone because it is concerned with life. A love that has no tolerance for hate, no excuses for racist decisions, no contentment in the status quo. I need a love that is fierce in its resilience and sacrifice. I need a love that chooses justice.
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Austin Channing Brown (I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness)
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What is known as the Gymnasium to-day is a positive insult to the Greek institution. Our system of education entirely loses sight of the fact that, in the long run, a healthy mind can exist only in a healthy body. This statement applies with few exceptions, particularly to the broad masses of the nation.
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Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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No one likes to feel used. When the perceived focus becomes the content over the person, people feel used. When teachers are valued only for the test scores of their students, they feel used. When administrators are "successful" only when they achieve "highly effective school" status, they feel used. Eventually, "used" people lose joy in learning and teaching. Curriculum does not teach; teachers do. Standards don't encourage; administrators do. Peaceable schools value personnel and students for who they are as worthy human beings. ... If your mission statement says you care, then specific practices of care should be habits within your school.
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Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz (The Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools: Teaching Responsibility; Creating Caring Climates (The Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding Series))
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Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.
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Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature)
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Except for my net, everything I have need of in the world is contained in that bag—including a second hat and a rather sizable jar of cold cream of roses. Do not tell me you couldn’t travel with as little. I have faith that men can be as reasonable and logical as women if they but try.” He shook his head. “I cannot seem to formulate a clear thought in the face of such original thinking, Miss Speedwell. You have a high opinion of your sex.” I pursed my lips. “Not all of it. We are, as a gender, undereducated and infantilized to the point of idiocy. But those of us who have been given the benefit of learning and useful occupation, well, we are proof that the traditional notions of feminine delicacy and helplessness are the purest poppycock.”
“You have large opinions for so small a person.”
“I daresay they would be large opinions even for someone your size,” I countered.
“And where did you form these opinions? Either your school was inordinately progressive or your governess was a Radical.”
“I never went to school, nor did I have a governess. Books were my tutors, Mr. Stoker. Anything I wished to learn I taught myself.”
“There are limits to an autodidactic education,” he pointed out.
“Few that I have found. I was spared the prejudices of formal educators."
“And neither were you inspired by them. A good teacher can change the course of a life,” he said thoughtfully.
“Perhaps. But I had complete intellectual freedom. I studied those subjects which interested me—to the point of obsession at times—and spent precious little time on things which did not.”
“Such as?”
“Music and needlework. I am astonishingly lacking in traditional feminine accomplishments.”
He cocked his head. “I am not entirely astonished.” But his tone was mild, and I accepted the statement as nothing like an insult. In fact, it felt akin to a compliment. “And I must confess that between Jane Austen and Fordyce’s Sermons, I have developed a general antipathy for clergymen. And their wives,” I added, thinking of Mrs. Clutterthorpe. “Well, in that we may be agreed. Tell me, do you find many people to share your views?”
“Shockingly few,” I admitted.
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Deanna Raybourn (A Curious Beginning (Veronica Speedwell, #1))
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The ideological component of multiculturalism can be summarized as a cultural relativism which finds the prominence of Western civilization in the world or in the schools intolerable. Behind this attitude is often a seething hostility to the West, barely concealed even in public statements designed to attract wider political support for the multicultural agenda.
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Thomas Sowell (Inside American Education)
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During a radio interview, when I tried explaining to the journalist the nuance and the difference between the two statements I was told that I was “too complicated”; so I simply walked out of the studio, leaving them in the lurch. The depressing part is that those people who were committing such mistakes were educated journalists entrusted to represent the world to us lay persons.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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The first basis for this statement is that I know you have reached the second chapter of a nonfiction book on a public policy issue, which means you are probably well above average in academic ability—not because getting to the second chapter of this book requires that you be especially bright, but because people with below-average academic ability hardly ever choose to read books like this.
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Charles Murray (Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality)
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Grant worded his message to remove any suspicion that he spoke for a particular religious denomination. Also buried in his statement was a courageous, farsighted plea for free, universal education for black children. The laconic Grant’s crusade for public education was a unique event in his presidency, the result of a riveting speech that had forced an issue on the national consciousness through powerful oratory.
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Ron Chernow (Grant)
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When people of color talk racism, Whites seem to interpret statements as a personal accusation, and rather than reach out to understand the content, respond in a defensive and protective posture. In many cases, even statements of racial facts/statistics such as definitions of racism, disparities in income and education, segregation of neighborhoods, hate crime figures, and so forth arouse defensiveness in many Whites.
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Derald Wing Sue (Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race)
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To these statements, Socrates, no one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down. And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring. For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by the very study which you extol.
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Plato (The Republic)
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He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education and, even more amazing, no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack. He would say often, "I been to school three years in my life. In Slaten, Texas, times was hard, and I had to help my daddy on the farm."
No recriminations lay hidden under the plain statement, nor was there boasting when he said, "If I'm living a little better now, it's because I treats everybody right.
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Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
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We regard the minimum wage rate as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books. The government first provides schools in which many young people, disproportionately black, are educated so poorly that they do not have the skills that would enable them to get good wages. It then penalizes them a second time by preventing them from offering to work for low wages as a means of inducing employers to give them on-the-job training. All this is in the name of helping the poor.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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Written culture itself, up to its recently implemented universal literacy, has had sharply selective effects. It has riven its host societies and formed a divide between literate and illiterate human beings, whose unbridgeability almost attained the firmness of a species differentiation. If one wished, despite Heidegger’s dissuasions, to speak anthropologically again, then the human beings of historical times could be defined as the animals of whom some can read and write while the others cannot. From here it is only a single step, if a demanding one, to the thesis that human beings are the animals of whom some breed those like them, while the others are bred—a thought that belongs to the pastoral folklore of Europeans since the time of Plato’s reflections on education and the state. Something of this is still heard in Nietzsche’s statement that few of the human beings in the small houses will, but most are willed. But to be only willed means to exist merely as an object, not as a subject, of selection.
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Peter Sloterdijk (Not Saved: Essays After Heidegger)
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The first requisite of all education and discipline should be man-timber. Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees. Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or an exquisite carving. But it must become timber first. Time and patience develop the sapling into the tree. So through discipline, education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy mental, moral, physical man-timber. If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other men’s time; if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure, feel that the eyes of the world are upon him, that he must not deviate a hair’s breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a stand at the outset, he would … come to have almost unlimited credit and the confidence of everybody who knows him.
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Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues)
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One feature of the voucher plan that has aroused particular concern is the possibility that parents could and would "add on" to the vouchers. If the voucher were for, say, $1,500, a parent could add another $500 to it and send his child to a school charging $2,000 tuition. Some fear that the result might be even wider differences in educational opportunities than now exist because low-income parents would not add to the amount of the voucher while middle-income and upper-income parents would supplement it extensively.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities. When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.
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Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
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Both Jew and Gentile enjoyed complexities, especially the Greeks with their philosophical systems. They loved mental gymnastics and intellectual labyrinths. They believed the truth was knowable, but only to those with elevated minds. This system later became known as gnosticism, a belief that certain people, by virtue of their enhanced reasoning powers, could move beyond the hoi polloi and ascend to the level of enlightenment. At the time of Paul, we can trace at least fifty different philosophies rattling around in the Roman and Greek world. And the gospel came along and said, “None of it matters. We’ll destroy it all. Take all the wisdom of the wise, get the best, get the elite, the most educated, the most capable, the smartest, the most clever, the best at rhetoric, oratory, logic; get all the wise, all the scribes, the legal experts, the great debaters, and they’re all going to be designated fools.” The gospel says they are all foolish. Paul’s quotation of Isaiah 29:14 in verse 19, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” had to be an offensive statement to his audience.
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus)
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In the Negev in Israel, Israeli authorities have refused to legally recognize 35 Palestinian Bedouin communities, making it impossible for their 90,000 or so residents to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. Instead, authorities have sought to concentrate Bedouin communities in larger recognized townships in order, as expressed in governmental plans and statements by officials, to maximize the land available for Jewish communities. Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal, and authorities have refused to connect most to the national electricity or water grids or to provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads or sewage systems. The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities, and residents live under constant threat of having their homes demolished. Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed one unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times.
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Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution)
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The real beauty of calibrated questions is the fact that they offer no target for attack like statements do. Calibrated questions have the power to educate your counterpart on what the problem is rather than causing conflict by telling them what the problem is. But calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment. They have a direction: once you figure out where you want a conversation to go, you have to design the questions that will ease the conversation in that direction while letting the other guy think it’s his choice to take you there.
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Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
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Assessment can be either formal and/or informal measures that gather information. In education, meaningful assessment is data that guides and informs the teacher and/or stakeholders of students' abilities, strategies, performance, content knowledge, feelings and/or attitudes. Information obtained is used to make educational judgements or evaluative statements. Most useful assessment is data which is used to adjust curriculum in order to benefit the students. Assessment should be used to inform instruction. Diagnosis and assessment should document literacy in real-world contexts using data as performance indicators of students' growth and development.
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Dan Greathouse & kathleen Donalson
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there remains nothing to hinder the belief that the devout Levite of Cyprus, the early convert to Christianity while still in strong sympathy with the Christian Jews, the man of benevolence and wealth, and therefore probably of education, by birth the appointed servant of the temple, the man of independence and dignity, and yet of such tender sympathy as to be surnamed "Son of consolation," the long and intimate companion of St. Paul, and for years in the position of his superior,--there is nothing to hinder the acceptance of the early ecclesiastical statement that he was also the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Frederic Gardiner.
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John Chrysostom (The Complete Works of Saint John Chrysostom (33 Books with Active ToC))
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So the real question for me as an educator is, if I go out and tell people that I think they are eating too much sugar, if I go out and tell mothers I think they should stop their kids from eating so much sugar because it is bad for them, am I going to get flak from the scientists? Or am I going to be allowed to make that statement without travail, on the grounds that even though we do not have hard evidence to link sugar with a specific disease, we do know that a dietary pattern containing considerably less sugar, in which sugar is replaced by a complex carbohydrate, would be a much healthier diet? JOAN GUSSOW, chairman, Columbia University nutrition department, 1975 I
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Gary Taubes (The Case Against Sugar)
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There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them.
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Roger Schank
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...Analyses of globalization may also include statistics on poverty and human development indicators such as health, life expectancy, education, and infant mortality. While such statistics are important and can provide powerful statements about reality, perspectives based mainly or exclusively on aggredate data remove us from the lives of real, embodied human beings. A shortcoming of these kinds of distant analyses is that they often miss or gloss over how peopple experience capitalist globalization in and on their bodies, and how embodied subjects in marginalized communities, both in the Global North and South, have challenged and resisted such powerful social forces (38).
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Barbara Sutton (Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina)
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O, but nobody thinks anything of these traders! They are universally despised, — never received into any decent society.” But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he? Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you refined and he coarse, you talented and he simple? In the day of a future judgment, these very considerations may make it more tolerable for him than for you.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin)
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I'll tell you God's truth.' His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. 'I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.'
He looked at me sideways – and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxford', or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.
'What part of the Middle West?' I inquired casually.
'San Francisco.'
'I see.
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F. Scott Fiztgerald (The Great Gatsby)
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Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.
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H.G. Wells (The Holy Terror)
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American parents and educators are told to give children choices, to respect their desires, to ask them questions as opposed to issuing orders, to refrain from pressuring or coercing them to do work they don’t want to do, and to offer positive reinforcement all the time. Children are supposed to want to do the work—otherwise, they shouldn’t have to do it. In contrast, the scripts that Asian culture offers its parents include statements, not questions, and orders, not requests. Children are routinely told what to do, and particularly when it comes to academic work, parents and educators don’t spend much time asking them what they want or catering to those desires. Asian parents see these scripts as the natural order of the family and society; the elder has wisdom and a responsibility to teach and discipline the child, and the child needs to learn from those elders.
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Maya Thiagarajan (Beyond the Tiger Mom: East-West Parenting for the Global Age)
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Look here, it's all very tidy and convenient to see the world in black and white,' said the Major, trying to soften his tone slightly. 'It's a particular passion of young men eager to sweep away their dusty elders.' He stopped to organize his thoughts into some statement short enough for a youthful attention span. 'However, philosophical rigidity is usually combined with a complete lack of education or real-world experience, and it is often augmented with strange haircuts and an aversion to bathing. Not in your case, of course—you are very neat.' Abdul Wahid looked confused, which was an improvement over the frown.
'You are very strange,' he said. 'Are you saying it is wrong, stupid, to try to live a life of faith?'
'No, I think it is admirable,' said the Major. 'But I think a life of faith must start with remembering that humility is the first virtue before God.
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Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew's Last Stand)
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The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, established in 1953 to consolidate the scattered welfare programs, began with a budget of $2 billion, less than 5 percent of expenditures on national defense. Twenty-five years later, in 1978, its budget was $160 billion, one and a half times as much as total spending on the army, the navy, and the air force. It had the third largest budget in the world, exceeded only by the entire budget of the U.S. government and of the Soviet Union. The department supervised a huge empire, penetrating every corner of the nation. More than one out of every 100 persons employed in this country worked in the HEW empire, either directly for the department or in programs for which HEW had responsibility but which were administered by state or local government units. All of us were affected by its activities. (In late 1979, HEW was subdivided by the creation of a separate Department of Education.)
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and pleasures of love, the knowledge of light and dark, the extinction and the perpetuity of empires--these were Spenser's subject; and they could not be treated without this third thing, a kind of time between time and eternity. He does not make it easy to extract philosophical notions from his text; but that he is concerned with the time-defeating aevum and uses it as a concord-fiction, I have no doubt. 'The seeds of knowledge,' as Descartes observed, 'are within us like fire in flint; philosophers educe them by reason, but the poets strike them forth by imagination, and they shine the more clearly.' We leave behind the philosophical statements, with their pursuit of logical consequences and distinctions, for a free, self-delighting inventiveness, a new imagining of the problems. Spenser used something like the Augustinian seminal reasons; he was probably not concerned about later arguments against them, finer discriminations. He does not tackle the questions, in the Garden cantos, of concreation, but carelessly--from a philosophical point of view--gives matter chronological priority. The point that creation necessitates mutability he may have found in Augustine, or merely noticed for himself, without wondering how it could be both that and a consequence of the Fall; it was an essential feature of one's experience of the world, and so were all the arguments, precise or not, about it.
Now one of the differences between doing philosophy and writing poetry is that in the former activity you defeat your object if you imitate the confusion inherent in an unsystematic view of your subject, whereas in the second you must in some measure imitate what is extreme and scattering bright, or else lose touch with that feeling of bright confusion. Thus the schoolmen struggled, when they discussed God, for a pure idea of simplicity, which became for them a very complex but still rational issue: for example, an angel is less simple than God but simpler than man, because a species is less simple than pure being but simpler than an individual. But when a poet discusses such matters, as in say 'Air and Angels,' he is making some human point, in fact he is making something which is, rather than discusses, an angel--something simple that grows subtle in the hands of commentators. This is why we cannot say the Garden of Adonis is wrong as the Faculty of Paris could say the Averroists were wrong. And Donne's conclusion is more a joke about women than a truth about angels. Spenser, though his understanding of the expression was doubtless inferior to that of St. Thomas, made in the Garden stanzas something 'more simple' than any section of the Summa. It was also more sensuous and more passionate. Milton used the word in his formula as Aquinas used it of angels; poetry is more simple, and accordingly more difficult to talk about, even though there are in poetry ideas which may be labelled 'philosophical.
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Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
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It was the ultimate sacrilege that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was rejected and even put to death. And it continues. In many parts of the world today we see a growing rejection of the Son of God. His divinity is questioned. His gospel is deemed irrelevant. In day-to-day life, His teachings are ignored. Those who legitimately speak in His name find little respect in secular society.
If we ignore the Lord and His servants, we may just as well be atheists—the end result is practically the same. It is what Mormon described as typical after extended periods of peace and prosperity: “Then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One” (Helaman 12:2). And so we should ask ourselves, do we reverence the Holy One and those He has sent?
Some years before he was called as an Apostle himself, Elder Robert D. Hales recounted an experience that demonstrated his father’s sense of that holy calling. Elder Hales said:
"Some years ago Father, then over eighty years of age, was expecting a visit from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a snowy winter day. Father, an artist, had painted a picture of the home of the Apostle. Rather than have the painting delivered to him, this sweet Apostle wanted to go personally to pick the painting up and thank my father for it. Knowing that Father would be concerned that everything was in readiness for the forthcoming visit, I dropped by his home. Because of the depth of the snow, snowplows had caused a snowbank in front of the walkway to the front door. Father had shoveled the walks and then labored to remove the snowbank. He returned to the house exhausted and in pain. When I arrived, he was experiencing heart pain from overexertion and stressful anxiety. My first concern was to warn him of his unwise physical efforts. Didn’t he know what the result of his labor would be?
"'Robert,' he said through interrupted short breaths, 'do you realize an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ is coming to my home? The walks must be clean. He should not have to come through a snowdrift.' He raised his hand, saying, 'Oh, Robert, don’t ever forget or take for granted the privilege it is to know and to serve with Apostles of the Lord.'" [In CR, April 1992, 89; or “Gratitude for the Goodness of God,” Ensign, May 1992, 64]
I think it is more than coincidence that such a father would be blessed to have a son serve as an Apostle.
You might ask yourself, “Do I see the calling of the prophets and apostles as sacred? Do I treat their counsel seriously, or is it a light thing with me?” President Gordon B. Hinckley, for instance, has counseled us to pursue education and vocational training; to avoid pornography as a plague; to respect women; to eliminate consumer debt; to be grateful, smart, clean, true, humble, and prayerful; and to do our best, our very best.
Do your actions show that you want to know and do what he teaches? Do you actively study his words and the statements of the Brethren? Is this something you hunger and thirst for? If so, you have a sense of the sacredness of the calling of prophets as the witnesses and messengers of the Son of God.
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D. Todd Christofferson
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It's work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers' questions about Blackness.
It's work to always be hyper visible because your skin - easily identified as being present or absent - but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you.
It's work to do the emotional labor of pointing out problematic racist thinking, policies, actions, and statements while desperately trying to avoid bitterness and cynicism.
It's work to stay open to an organization to learn new skills without drinking in the cultural expectations of body size, personality, interests, and talents most valued according to whiteness.
Quite frankly, the work isn't just tedious. It can be dangerous for Black women to attempt to carve out space for themselves - their perspective, their gifts, their skills, their education, their experiences - in places that haven't examined the prevailing assumption of white culture. The danger of letting whiteness walk off with our joy, our peace, our sense of dignity and self-love, is ever present.
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Austin Channing Brown (I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness)
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JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”:
“Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.
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A.E. Samaan (From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848)
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New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news!
Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face.
It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it.
Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow."
The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen.
I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole.
Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy.
And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.
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Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
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Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.
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Benjamin L. Corey (Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus)
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unfairness can take many forms. It can take the form of the inheritance of property—bonds and stocks, houses, factories; it can also take the form of the inheritance of talent—musical ability, strength, mathematical genius. The inheritance of property can be interfered with more readily than the inheritance of talent. But from an ethical point of view, is there any difference between the two? Yet many people resent the inheritance of property but not the inheritance of talent. Look at the same issue from the point of view of the parent. If you want to assure your child a higher income in life, you can do so in various ways. You can buy him (or her) an education that will equip him to pursue an occupation yielding a high income; or you can set him up in a business that will yield a higher income than he could earn as a salaried employee; or you can leave him property, the income from which will enable him to live better. Is there any ethical difference among these three ways of using your property? Or again, if the state leaves you any money to spend over and above taxes, should the state permit you to spend it on riotous living but not to leave it to your children?
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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Apply the following statements to a significant EIP in your life and in your journal write “agree” or “disagree” for each one. I agree that your needs should come before anyone else’s. I agree not to speak my own mind when I’m around you. Please say anything you want, and I won’t object. Yes, I must be ignorant if I think differently from you. Of course you should be upset if anyone says no to you about anything. Please educate me about what I should like or dislike. Yes, it makes sense for you to decide how much time I should want to spend with you. You’re right, I should show you “respect” by disowning my own thoughts in your presence. Of course you shouldn’t have to exercise self-control if you don’t feel like it. It’s fine if you don’t think before you speak. It’s true: you should never have to wait or deal with any unpleasantness. I agree: you shouldn’t have to adjust when circumstances change around you. It’s okay if you ignore me, snap at me, or don’t act glad to see me: I’ll still want to spend time with you. Of course you are entitled to be rude. I agree that you shouldn’t have to take direction from anyone. Please talk as long as you like about your favorite topics; I’m ready to just listen and never be asked any questions about myself.
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Lindsay C. Gibson (Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy)
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This matter of not being able to understand may not be as drastic as you make it out. Of course two peoples and two languages will never be able to communicate with each other so intimately as two individuals who belong to the same nation and speak the same language. But that is no reason to forgo the effort at communication. Within nations there are also barriers which stand in the way of complete communication and complete mutual understanding, barriers of culture, education, talent, individuality. It might be asserted that every human being on earth can fundamentally hold a dialogue with every other human being, and it might also be asserted that there are no two persons in the world between whom genuine, whole, intimate understanding is possible - the one statement is as true as the other. It is Yin and Yang, day and night; both are right and at times we have to be reminded of both. To be sure, I too do not believe that you and I will ever be able to communicate fully, and without some residue of misunderstanding, with each other. But though you may be an occidental and I a Chinese, though we may speak different languages, if we are men of good will we shall have a great deal to say to each other, and beyond what is precisely communicable we can guess and sense a great deal about each other. At any rate let us try.
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Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
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(7) The impact on public schools. It is essential to separate the rhetoric of the school bureaucracy from the real problems that would be raised. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers claim that vouchers would destroy the public school system, which, according to them, has been the foundation and cornerstone of our democracy. Their claims are never accompanied by any evidence that the public school system today achieves the results claimed for it—whatever may have been true in earlier times. Nor do the spokesmen for these organizations ever explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn't, why anyone should object to its "destruction." The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfactory, not even the most comprehensive voucher plan would have much effect. The public schools would remain dominant, perhaps somewhat improved by the threat of potential competition. But elsewhere, and particularly in the urban slums where the public schools are doing such a poor job, most parents would undoubtedly try to send their children to nonpublic schools.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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Narrow behaviourist thinking
permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the
childrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academic
discourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a full
understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causes
are not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an expert
on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the
National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems
astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no
understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,
without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pin
down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are
often the active representations of emotional states and of special
kinds of brain functioning.
As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain
patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.
Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various
social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive
to change not them but their environments. These are the only things
we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within
and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much
that we can do.
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Gabor Maté
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Let schools specialize, as private schools would, and common interest would overcome bias of color and lead to more integration than now occurs. The integration would be real, not merely on paper. The voucher scheme would eliminate the forced busing that a large majority of both blacks and whites object to. Busing would occur, and might indeed increase, but it would be voluntary—just as the busing of children to music and dance classes is today. The failure of black leaders to espouse vouchers has long puzzled us. Their constituents would benefit most. It would give them control over the schooling of their children, eliminate domination by both the city-wide politicians and, even more important, the entrenched educational bureaucracy. Black leaders frequently send their own children to private schools. Why do they not help others to do the same? Our tentative answer is that vouchers would also free the black man from domination by his own political leaders, who currently see control over schooling as a source of political patronage and power. However, as the educational opportunities open to the mass of black children have continued to deteriorate, an increasing number of black educators, columnists, and other community leaders have started to support vouchers. The Congress of Racial Equality has made the support of vouchers a major plank in its agenda.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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(i) Social benefits. When we first started writing about higher education, we had a good deal of sympathy for the first justification. We no longer do. In the interim we have tried to induce the people who make this argument to be specific about the alleged social benefits. The answer is almost always simply bad economics. We are told that the nation benefits by having more highly skilled and trained people, that investment in providing such skills is essential for economic growth, that more trained people raise the productivity of the rest of us. These statements are correct. But none is a valid reason for subsidizing higher education. Each statement would be equally correct if made about physical capital (i.e., machines, factory buildings, etc.), yet hardly anyone would conclude that tax money should be used to subsidize the capital investment of General Motors or General Electric. If higher education improves the economic productivity of individuals, they can capture that improvement through higher earnings, so they have a private incentive to get the training. Adam Smith's invisible hand makes their private interest serve the social interest. It is against the social interest to change their private interest by subsidizing schooling. The extra students—those who will only go to college if it is subsidized—are precisely the ones who judge that the benefits they receive are less than the costs. Otherwise they would be willing to pay the costs themselves.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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The Blue Mind Rx Statement
Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans.
The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being.
In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters.
Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history.
Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety.
We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points:
•Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies.
•Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits.
•All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy.
•Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both.
•Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support.
•Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.
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Wallace J. Nichols (Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do)
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Sometimes, for instance, there would be a matter the governor didn’t want to discuss in public, but we knew he’d be asked about it at his next public appearance, or in any case Aaron would be asked about it. Let’s say the head of a cabinet agency had been accused by a state senator of running a cockfighting ring. His behavior would fall within executive purview, but since he had not been indicted or even legally accused, he couldn’t be fired or forced to resign. Aaron knew the governor would be asked about it at a press conference, so our office would issue a statement to any member of the press who asked about it. “[The senator’s] remarks have raised some troubling questions,” the statement might say, “and we’re looking closely at the situation in an effort to determine whether it merits further investigation by state or local law enforcement. At the same time, we want to avoid rushing to judgment, and we hope all concerned will likewise avoid making accusations in the absence of evidence.” This is the kind of statement Aaron would need: one that said something without saying anything. It would get the governor on record without committing him to any course of action. Hence the rhetorical dead weight: “state or local law enforcement” instead of just “law enforcement”; all that about “rushing to judgment” and “making accusations in the absence of evidence,” as if anybody needed to be told that. If a reporter asked the governor about it, he could avoid talking about it without having to use that self-incriminating phrase “No comment.” “I’d go back to what we’ve already said on this,” he might say, and repeat the gaseous phrases of the statement.
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Barton Swaim (The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics)
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You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. When you, body and soul, wish to make a certain expression and cannot be distracted from this one desire, then you will be able to make a great use of whatever technical knowledge you have. You will have clairvoyance, you will see the uses of the technique you already have, and you will invent more. I know I have said a lot when I say "You can do anything you want to do." But I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do. An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. This is what I call self-development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself. There is nothing more entertaining than to have a frank talk with yourself. Few do it—frankly. Educating yourself is getting acquainted with yourself. Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing. When a man is full up with what he is talking about he handles such language as he has with a mastery unusual to him, and it is at such times that he learns language.
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Robert Henri (The Art Spirit)
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(6) Doubt about new schools. Is this not all a pipe dream? Private schools now are almost all either parochial schools or elite academies. Will the effect of the voucher plan simply be to subsidize these, while leaving the bulk of the slum dwellers in inferior public schools? What reason is there to suppose that alternatives will really arise? The reason is that a market would develop where it does not exist today. Cities, states, and the federal government today spend close to $100 billion a year on elementary and secondary schools. That sum is a third larger than the total amount spent annually in restaurants and bars for food and liquor. The smaller sum surely provides an ample variety of restaurants and bars for people in every class and place. The larger sum, or even a fraction of it, would provide an ample variety of schools. It would open a vast market that could attract many entrants, both from public schools and from other occupations. In the course of talking to various groups about vouchers, we have been impressed by the number of persons who said something like, "I have always wanted to teach [or run a school] but I couldn't stand the educational bureaucracy, red tape, and general ossification of the public schools. Under your plan, I'd like to try my hand at starting a school." Many of the new schools would be established by nonprofit groups. Others would be established for profit. There is no way of predicting the ultimate composition of the school industry. That would be determined by competition. The one prediction that can be made is that only those schools that satisfy their customers will survive—just as only those restaurants and bars that satisfy their customers survive. Competition would see to that.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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This view seems to us an example of the kind of egalitarianism discussed in the preceding chapter: letting parents spend money on riotous living but trying to prevent them from spending money on improving the schooling of their children. It is particularly remarkable coming from Coons and Sugarman, who elsewhere say, "A commitment to equality at the deliberate expense of the development of individual children seems to us the final corruption of whatever is good in the egalitarian instinct"18—a sentiment with which we heartily agree. In our judgment the very poor would benefit the most from the voucher plan. How can one conceivably justify objecting to a plan, "however much it improved [the] education" of the poor, in order to avoid "government finance of" what the authors call "economic segregation," even if it could be demonstrated to have that effect? And of course, it cannot be demonstrated to have that effect. On the contrary, we are persuaded on the basis of considerable study that it would have precisely the opposite effect—though we must accompany that statement with the qualification that "economic segregation" is so vague a term that it is by no means clear what it means. The egalitarian religion is so strong that some proponents of restricted vouchers are unwilling to approve even experiments with unrestricted vouchers. Yet to our knowledge, none has ever offered anything other than unsupported assertions to support the fear that an unrestricted voucher system would foster "economic segregation." This view also seems to us another example of the tendency of intellectuals to denigrate parents who are poor. Even the very poorest can—and do—scrape up a few extra dollars to improve the quality of their children's schooling, although they cannot replace the whole of the present cost of public schooling. We suspect that add-ons would be about as frequent among the poor as among the rest, though perhaps of smaller amounts.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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Sean Penn mourned the death of the fifty-eight-year-old socialist creep. Sean wrote in a statement sent to the Hollywood Reporter: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” He added: “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.” Penn needs to tell you that he knew the guy. A world leader. That’s cool. I guess playing Jeff Spicoli and marrying Madonna wasn’t enough (one made your career, the other ruined your urinary tract). Yeah, this is the same chap who told Piers Morgan that Ted Cruz should be institutionalized. Talk about the pot calling the kettle batshit crazy. If Penn got any nuttier, he’d be a Snickers bar. Of course it would be uncool to point out to Penn that Chávez was no champion of the poor. Under his rule people became far poorer in Venezuela. And in the midst of an oil boom, Chávez engineered a murder boom. The murder rate in his country tripled during Chávez’s tyrannical tenure, hitting a high of 67 per 100,000 residents in 2011, compared with a murder rate of less than 5 per 100,000 in the United States (and that includes Baltimore). And about 10 or 20 less than the last Penn movie. Penn was joined, per usual, by director Oliver Stone, who said, solemnly, somewhere: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.” He added: “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history. “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.” This is from an adult, mind you. And no list of apologists for evil is complete without Michael Moore. This nugget comes from the Michigan Live website, which reports Moore praising Chávez in a feeble collection of Twitter messages, on the night the Venezuelan viper expired. Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous. US
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Greg Gutfeld (Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You)
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I insist on the following point: people should finally stop confusing philosophical labourers and scientific people in general with philosophers - that in this particular matter we strictly assign "to each his due" and do not give too much to the former and much too little to the latter. It may be that the education of a real philosopher requires that he himself has stood for a while on all of those steps where his servants, the scientific labourers in philosophy, remain - and must remain. Perhaps he must himself have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and solver of riddles and moralist and prophet and "free spirit" and almost everything, in order to move through the range of human worth and feelings of value and to be able to look with a variety of different eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every expanse. But all these things are only pre-conditions for his task: the task itself seeks something different - it demands that he create values. Those philosophical labourers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to establish some large collection of facts or other concerning estimates of value - that is, earlier statements of value, creations of value which have become dominant and for a while have been called "truths." They have to press these into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or politics (morality) or art. The task of these researchers is to make everything that has happened and which has been valued up to now clear, easy to imagine, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything lengthy, even "time" itself, and to overpower the entire past, a huge and marvellous task, in whose service every sophisticated pride and every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. But the real philosophers are commanders and lawgivers: they say "That is how it should be!" They determine first the "Where to?" and the "What for?" of human beings, and, as they do this, they have at their disposal the preliminary work of all philosophical labourers, all those who have overpowered the past - they reach with their creative hands to grasp the future. In that process, everything which is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their "knowing" is creating; their creating is establishing laws; their will to truth is - will to power. - Are there such philosophers nowadays? Have there ever been such philosophers? Is it not necessary that there be such philosophers?....
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
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Of course, not everyone agreed with Professor Glaude’s assessment. Joel C. Gregory, a white professor of preaching at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and coauthor of What We Love about the Black Church,8 took issue with Glaude’s pronouncement of the Black Church’s death. Gregory, a self-described veteran of preaching in “more than two hundred African-American congregations, conferences, and conventions in more than twenty states each year,” found himself at a loss for an explanation of Glaude’s statements. Gregory offered six signs of vitality in the African-American church, including: thriving preaching, vitality in worship, continuing concern for social justice, active community service, high regard for education, and efforts at empowerment. Gregory contends that these signs of life can be found in African-American congregations in every historically black denomination and in varying regions across the country. He writes: Where is the obituary? I do not know any organization in America today that has the vitality of the black church. Lodges are dying, civic clubs are filled with octogenarians, volunteer organizations are languishing, and even the academy has to prove the worth of a degree. The government is divided, the schoolroom has become a war zone, mainline denominations are staggering, and evangelical megachurch juggernauts show signs of lagging. Above all this entropy stands one institution that is more vital than ever: the praising, preaching, and empowering black church.9 The back-and-forth between those pronouncing death and those highlighting life reveals the difficulty of defining “the Black Church.” In fact, we must admit that speaking of “the Black Church” remains a quixotic quest. “The Black Church” really exists as multiple black churches across denominational, theological, and regional lines. To some extent, we can define the Black Church by referring to the historically black denominations—National Baptist, Progressive Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal (AME), African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), Church of God in Christ (COGIC), and so on. But increasingly we must recognize that one part of “the Black Church” exists as predominantly black congregations belonging to majority white denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention or even African-American members of predominantly white churches. Still, other quarters of “the Black Church” belong to nondenominational affinity groups like the many congregations involved in Word of Faith and “prosperity gospel” networks sponsored by leaders like Creflo A. Dollar Jr. and T. D. Jakes. Clearly “the Black Church” is not one thing. Black churches come in as many flavors as any other ethnic communion. Indeed, many African-Americans have experiences with many parts of the varied Black Church world.
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Thabiti M. Anyabwile (Reviving the Black Church)
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While David runs the financial end of the Rockefeller dynasty, Nelson runs the political. Nelson would like to be President of the United States. But, unfortunately for him, he is unacceptable to the vast majority of the grass roots of his own party. The next best thing to being President is controlling a President. Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon are supposed to be bitter political competitors. In a sense they are, but that still does not preclude Rockefeller from asserting dominion over Mr. Nixon. When Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rockefeller competed for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller naturally would have preferred to win the prize, but regardless of who won, he would control the highest office in the land.
You will recall that right in the middle of drawing up the Republican platform in 1960, Mr. Nixon suddenly left Chicago and flew to New York to meet with Nelson Rockefeller in what Barry Goldwater described as the "Munich of the Republican Party." There was no political reason why Mr. Nixon needed to crawl to Mr. Rockefeller. He had the convention all sewed up. The Chicago Tribune cracked that it was like Grant surrendering to Lee.
In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White noted that Nixon accepted all the Rockefeller terms for this meeting, including provisions "that Nixon telephone Rockefeller personally with his request for a meeting; that they meet at the Rockefeller apartment…that their meeting be secret and later be announced in a press release from the Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting be clearly announced as taking place at the Vice President's request; that the statement of policy issuing from it be long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary communiqué."
The meeting produced the infamous "Compact of Fifth Avenue" in which the Republican Platform was scrapped and replaced by Rockefeller's socialist plans. The Wall Street Journal of July 25, 1960, commented: "…a little band of conservatives within the party…are shoved to the sidelines… [T]he fourteen points are very liberal indeed; they comprise a platform akin in many ways to the Democratic platform and they are a far cry from the things that conservative men think the Republican Party ought to stand for…" As Theodore White put it:
"Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop of the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by the open compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the platform committee had been wiped out. A single night's meeting of the two men in a millionaire's triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, eight hundred and thirty miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see."
The whole story behind what happened in Rockefeller's apartment will doubtless never be known. We can only make an educated guess in light of subsequent events. But it is obvious that since that time Mr. Nixon has been in the Rockefeller orbit.
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Gary Allen (None Dare Call It Conspiracy)
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On Mr. Phipps' discovering the place of my concealment, he cocked his gun and aimed at me. I requested him not to shoot and I would give up, upon which he demanded my sword. I delivered it to him, and he brought me to prison. During the time I was pursued, I had many hair breadth escapes, which your time will not permit you to relate. I am here loaded with chains, and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me.
I here proceeded to make some inquiries of him after assuring him of the certain death that awaited him, and that concealment would only bring destruction on the innocent as well as guilty, of his own color, if he knew of any extensive or concerted plan. His answer was, I do not. When I questioned him as to the insurrection in North Carolina happening about the same time, he denied any knowledge of it; and when I looked him in the face as though I would search his inmost thoughts, he replied, 'I see sir, you doubt my word; but can you not think the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heaven's might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking.' I now had much conversation with and asked him many questions, having forborne to do so previously, except in the cases noted in parenthesis; but during his statement, I had, unnoticed by him, taken notes as to some particular circumstances, and having the advantage of his statement before me in writing, on the evening of the third day that I had been with him, I began a cross examination, and found his statement corroborated by every circumstance coming within my own knowledge or the confessions of others whom had been either killed or executed, and whom he had not seen nor had any knowledge since 22d of August last, he expressed himself fully satisfied as to the impracticability of his attempt. It has been said he was ignorant and cowardly, and that his object was to murder and rob for the purpose of obtaining money to make his escape. It is notorious, that he was never known to have a dollar in his life; to swear an oath, or drink a drop of spirits. As to his ignorance, he certainly never had the advantages of education, but he can read and write, (it was taught him by his parents,) and for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, is surpassed by few men I have ever seen. As to his being a coward, his reason as given for not resisting Mr. Phipps, shews the decision of his character. When he saw Mr. Phipps present his gun, he said he knew it was impossible for him to escape as the woods were full of men; he therefore thought it was better to surrender, and trust to fortune for his escape. He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part most admirably. On other subjects he possesses an uncommon share of intelligence, with a mind capable of attaining any thing; but warped and perverted by the influence of early impressions. He is below the ordinary stature, though strong and active, having the true negro face, every feature of which is strongly marked. I shall not attempt to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and commented on by himself, in the condemned hole of the prison. The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered with chains; yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man; I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.
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Nat Turner (The Confessions of Nat Turner)
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There are many who profess to be religious and speak of themselves as Christians, and, according to one such, “as accepting the scriptures only as sources of inspiration and moral truth,” and then ask in their smugness: “Do the revelations of God give us a handrail to the kingdom of God, as the Lord’s messenger told Lehi, or merely a compass?”
Unfortunately, some are among us who claim to be Church members but are somewhat like the scoffers in Lehi’s vision—standing aloof and seemingly inclined to hold in derision the faithful who choose to accept Church authorities as God’s special witnesses of the gospel and his agents in directing the affairs of the Church.
There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.) One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.”
Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve and an eminent educator, made a statement relative to this word liberal as it applied to those in the Church. This is what he said:
“The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. . . . He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations. . . .
“It is folly to speak of a liberal religion, if that religion claims that it rests upon unchanging truth.”
And then Dr. Widtsoe concludes his statement with this: “It is well to beware of people who go about proclaiming that they are or their churches are liberal. The probabilities are that the structure of their faith is built on sand and will not withstand the storms of truth.” (“Evidences and Reconciliations,” Improvement Era, vol. 44 [1941], p. 609.)
Here again, to use the figure of speech in Lehi’s vision, they are those who are blinded by the mists of darkness and as yet have not a firm grasp on the “iron rod.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, when there are questions which are unanswered because the Lord hasn’t seen fit to reveal the answers as yet, all such could say, as Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said, “I accept all I read in the Bible that I can understand, and accept the rest on faith.” . . .
Wouldn’t it be a great thing if all who are well schooled in secular learning could hold fast to the “iron rod,” or the word of God, which could lead them, through faith, to an understanding, rather than to have them stray away into strange paths of man-made theories and be plunged into the murky waters of disbelief and apostasy? . . .
Cyprian, a defender of the faith in the Apostolic Period, testified, and I quote, “Into my heart, purified of all sin, there entered a light which came from on high, and then suddenly and in a marvelous manner, I saw certainty succeed doubt.” . . .
The Lord issued a warning to those who would seek to destroy the faith of an individual or lead him away from the word of God or cause him to lose his grasp on the “iron rod,” wherein was safety by faith in a Divine Redeemer and his purposes concerning this earth and its peoples.
The Master warned: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better … that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6.)
The Master was impressing the fact that rather than ruin the soul of a true believer, it were better for a person to suffer an earthly death than to incur the penalty of jeopardizing his own eternal destiny.
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Harold B. Lee
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Zarqawi insisted that his group was behaving in a strictly Islamic manner: “the Mujahideen carry out their operations under strict adherence to the rules of engagement as set forth by Allah, His messenger, our prophet Muhammad, and his companions.” His followers’ Islam-approved methods followed from their overall goal as jihad warriors: “And why not? After all, the Mujahideen took to the battle fields only to establish the Deen [religion] of Allah (Islam), to make the word of Allah high above any others, and to gain the pleasure of Allah.” This statement is noteworthy in light of the fact that Western analysts universally ascribe the roots of jihad terror to poverty, lack of educational or economic opportunity—anything other than an endeavor to “establish the Deen of Allah” and “to make the word of Allah high above any others, and to gain the pleasure of Allah.
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Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (Complete Infidel's Guides))
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The student with whom Hal shared a bedroom, Englishman John Abel Smith, bore educational credentials that Hal could only dimly conceive. John was the namesake of a renowned merchant banker and British Member of Parliament. He had attended Eton, one of the world’s most famous preparatory schools, before entering Cambridge, where he had “read” under the personal tutelage of English scholars. Hal began to understand the difference between his public-school education and the background of his roommates when he surveyed them relative to a reading list he came across. It was titled, “One Hundred Books Every Educated Person Ought to Have Read.” George Montgomery and Powell Cabot had read approximately seventy and eighty, respectively. John Abel Smith had read all but four. Hal had read (though not necessarily finished) six. Hal also felt his social inferiority. He had long known that his parents weren’t fashionable. His mother never had her hair done in a beauty parlor. His father owned only one pair of dress shoes at a time and frequently took long trips abroad with nothing but his briefcase and a single change of underwear, washing his clothes—including a “wash-and-wear” suit—in hotel sinks at night. That was part of the reason why Hal took an expensive tailored suit—a broad-shouldered pinstripe—and a new fedora hat to Boston. He knew that he needed to rise to a new level, fashion-wise. But he realized that his fashion statement had failed when Powell Cabot asked, late in October, to borrow his suit and hat. Hal’s swell of pride turned to chagrin when Powell explained his purpose—he had been invited to a Halloween costume party, and he wanted to go as a gangster.
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Robert I. Eaton (I Will Lead You Along: The Life of Henry B. Eyring)
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The recklessness of the governments of two terrestrial countries has been obvious, when they have ordered their combat pilots to attack our space and scout ships, as soon as they are detected on their radar. This is highly dangerous for the crew members of your airplanes, because if they approach our gravitational field, their engines and controls become inoperative. In this way, several have lost their lives . . . They do not seem to understand that our orders are clear, not to harm their craft. Otherwise, at least 50 of their planes would have been destroyed. We are aware that many high-ranking military personnel and scientists have been silenced under the pretense of endangering the security of their countries, if public statements were to be made. This is another serious mistake of those governments. If we had any ambition or desire to conquer this planet, we would have done it 300 years ago, when the population could not have opposed any resistance. Even now, it would not be difficult to do. This phase is alternative: we shall continue making appearances, landings, contacts, all over the world, more and more frequently, as planned. You will be responsible for the education of the people in the different countries . . . using all means available. This is a difficult task, because you will be left to your own means [and] you will have against you those who do not take you seriously, and the dark machinations of the great established powers on your planet, hampering, creating doubts, and attacking you as promoters of this knowledge . . . After many years of observation and analysis of your world . . . the conclusion was that humankind, with few exceptions, were a barbarian horde . . . from the deepest levels of their spirit, and utterly incorrigible. Nevertheless, because of the merit of the few, [we are giving] direct help to many men, instructing them. It requires in many cases their evacuation from this planet, to a special place where they will be provided with a new conscience, to be transmitted afterwards to their fellow men . . . The disappearances of such people from Earth have already begun . . . This procedure holds the key to the future of your planet.
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Timothy Good (Unearthly Disclosure)
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Prof. Louis Menand of Harvard, in a May 5 statement, argued that an education focused on narrow academic disciplines was inadequate: “Less than 20 percent of our students go on to get Ph.D.s,” he said. Many students end up in the business world, broadly construed, not in academia. In a separate May 5 statement, Prof. Sean D.
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Anonymous
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hone the skills associated with effective citizenship. A partial list of such skills might include the ability to research and analyze an issue, to educate and organize the public, to write and deliver statements at hearings or events, and to use the media to advance one’s cause.
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Gregory A. Smith (Place- and Community-Based Education in Schools)
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Public education’s commendable aim of creating “equal opportunity for all” is too easily subverted by the egregious aim of creating a clean conscience for the few. If everybody can “read at grade level,” then we need not be overly concerned if some people get to read fabulous dividend statements and other people, who may be working twice as hard, get to read pink slips. All we need hope is that the latter sort never get to read Marx.
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Robert Atwan (Best American Essays 2012)
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When Hinshaw and Scheffler make the provocative statement that the primary trigger of ADHD is compulsory education, they are fully aware of the heritability of the underlying symptoms and problems. Their direct implication is that ADHD reveals itself through the ever-increasing push for academic and job performance in an increasingly competitive world economy.
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Stephen P. Hinshaw (The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today's Push for Performance)
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Gibbs (2003) and others (e.g., Straus, Richardson, Glaziou, & Haynes, 2005) have provided detailed suggestions in this regard. Some general principles for clinicians are as follows. Evidence from multiple studies is always preferred to results of a single study. Systematic reviews of research are preferable to traditional narrative reviews. Thus, clinicians should look for systematic reviews, mindful of the fact that these reviews vary in quality. The Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations are good sources of high-quality systematic reviews. Clinicians can and should assess potential sources of bias in any review. The characteristics of systematic reviews described in this chapter can be used as a yardstick that clinicians can use to judge how well specific reviews measure up. The QUOROM statement (Moher et al., 1999) provides guidance about what to look for in reports on systematic reviews, as does a recent report by Shea et al. (2007). When relevant reviews are not available, out of date, or potentially biased, clinicians can identify individual studies and assess the credibility of those studies, using one of many tools developed for this purpose (e.g., Gibbs, 2003). It would be ideal if clinicians were able to rely on others to produce valid research syntheses. Above all, clinicians should remember that critical thinking is crucial to understanding and using evidence. Authorities, expert opinion, and lists of ESTs provide insufficient evidence for sound clinical practice. Further, clinicians must determine how credible evidence relates to the particular needs, values, preferences, circumstances, and ultimately, the responses of their clients. Clinicians and researchers also need to have an effect on policy so that EBP is not interpreted in a way that unfairly restricts treatments. Policymakers and others can be educated about the nature of EBP. EBP is a process aimed at informing the choices that clinicians make. It should inform and enhance practice, “increasing, not dictating, choice” (Dickersin, Straus, & Bero, 2007, p. s10). EBP supports choices among alternative treatments that have similar effects. It supports the choice of a less effective alternative, when an effective treatment is not acceptable to a client. Policymakers and others can be educated about the nature of evidence and methods of research synthesis. Empirical evidence is tentative, and it evolves over time as new information is added to the knowledge base. At present, there is insufficient evidence about the effectiveness of most psychological and psychosocial treatments (including some so-called empirically supported treatments). Policymakers need to understand that most lists of effective treatments are not based on rigorous systematic reviews; thus, they are not necessarily based on sound evidence. It makes little sense to base policy decisions on lists of preferred treatments because this limits consumer choice. Lists of selected or preferred treatments should not restrict the use of other potentially effective treatments. Policies that restrict treatments that have been shown to be harmful or ineffective, however, are of benefit. Lists of harmful or wasteful treatments could be compiled to discourage their use.
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Bruce E. Wampold (The Heart & Soul of Change: Delivering What Works in Therapy)
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This rip-off relied on a series of blatant lies. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” “The average family will save more than $2,400 per year.” “Health care costs will decline.” “Health care premiums will go down.” “Everyone in this country will now have health insurance.” Even though Obama kept saying these things, none of them was true. These statements were simply part of the con man’s “pitch.” For progressives, Obamacare was a prize. The prize was control of the huge American health care system, representing virtually one-sixth of the whole economy. Obamacare put progressives in charge of more than 10 million doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and technicians and support staff. Obamacare gave progressives control of more than five thousand hospitals and almost a million hospital beds. The system included hospitals and also drug companies, insurance companies, and the producers of hospital equipment, not to mention research and educational institutions. Obamacare was a heist with a very big payoff.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
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Noah Webster's statement that "the virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities" reflected a mind-set that dominated not only late eighteenth-century
political ideology but the resultant nineteenth-century American theory of education.25
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Gretchen A. Adams (The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America)
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Though the researchers concluded that there was general openness about the increasing diversity, particularly among younger and college-educated respondents, they also found that one of the greatest concerns respondents had about rising diversity was job availability. Fifty-four percent agreed with the survey statement, “There will not be enough jobs for everybody.” Consistent with the 2015 American Values Survey, a significant percentage (42 percent) expressed fear that discrimination against Whites will increase as the diversity of the population increases. This anxiety was particularly prevalent among White conservatives (61 percent) and White respondents ages sixty-five or older (56 percent).
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Beverly Daniel Tatum (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?)
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Young Iranians educated at the Sorbonne returned to Iran as committed Marxists willing to subjugate themselves to Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-Shah opposition.’[Marx] exposes the imperialists and their rape of all the countries of the Third World, including Iran’ parroted one student, a leftist who donned a chador not because she understood or believed in Islam but because she wanted to make a political statement against the Shah’s regime. Though Marx had condemned religion as the ‘opiate of the masses … in developing countries it is different. At times, religious feelings and social movements go hand in hand. That is the way it is now in Iran. We are all of us united against the Shah. We are in an Islamic country, and all social movements inevitably have a religious coloring. We do not believe there will ever be Communism here as there is Communism in Russia or China. We will have our own brand of socialism.’ Remarks like hers pointed to a curious phenomenon last seen in Imperial Russia sixty years before: Iran’s best-educated minds helping their future executioners erect scaffolds in their name.
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Andrew Scott Cooper (The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran)
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There is little doubt in my mind now that the prevailing sentiment of the South would have been opposed to secession in 1860 and 1861, if there had been a fair and calm expression of opinion, unbiased by threats, and if the ballot of one legal voter had counted for as much as that of any other. But there was no calm discussion of the question. Demagogues who were too old to enter the army if there should be a war, others who entertained so high an opinion of their own ability that they did not believe they could be spared from the direction of the affairs of state in such an event, declaimed vehemently and unceasingly against the North; against its aggressions upon the South; its interference with Southern rights, etc., etc. They denounced the Northerners as cowards, poltroons, negro-worshippers; claimed that one Southern man was equal to five Northern men in battle; that if the South would stand up for its rights the North would back down. Mr. Jefferson Davis said in a speech, delivered at La Grange, Mississippi, before the secession of that State, that he would agree to drink all the blood spilled south of Mason and Dixon's line if there should be a war. The young men who would have the fighting to do in case of war, believed all these statements, both in regard to the aggressiveness of the North and its cowardice. They, too, cried out for a separation from such people. The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre—what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. Under the old regime they were looked down upon by those who controlled all the affairs in the interest of slave-owners, as poor white trash who were allowed the ballot so long as they cast it according to direction. I
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Ulysses S. Grant (Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant)