Superintendent Quotes

I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.

To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness.

No matter how tiny you look, you can lead huge men if you have what the huge men don't have.

Liking is more important than loving. It lasts. I want what is between us to last, Luke. I don't want us just to love each other and marry and get tired of each other and then want to marry some one else." "Oh! my dear Love, I know. You want reality. So do I. What's between us will last for ever because it's founded on reality.

fiction is founded on truth... unless things did happen, people couldn't think of them.

The other three incoming calls were from his building superintendent, his pharmacy and a telephone survey company." "Bastards. They always call during dinner." Liv laughed as I slid the sliced steak onto a platter and topped it with sautéed vegetables. "Forget crime lords and corrupt politicians - telemarketers are the root of all evil." "Now you're getting it.

Jerry Laws, former smokejumper and now high school district superintendent: “We’re making changes in this district. Teachers teaching, not proselytizing, preparing students for life. No social promotions. Good order in every classroom. They must earn what they seek.

The Director of the US Marshals Service, who does not like Pack: “Seems to me Simon Pack’s a grandstander. I remind you I’m a West Pointer myself. I remember his ill-fated year as Superintendent, acting as if he were MacArthur incarnate. The All-America player in a couple sports, the man in the College Football Hall of Fame; the Governor of a small state; the leader of a constitutional convention. And yeah, he was also a hobo, maybe the biggest grandstand move he ever undertook.

No one human being knows the full truth about another human being. Not even one's nearest and dearest.

Truth is seldom romantic.

Sanity is the one unbelievable bore. One must be mad, slightly twisted - then one sees life from a new and entrancing angle.

When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. [...] The murder itself is the end of the story. It's Zero Hour.” He paused. “It's Zero Hour now.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I've got a plan. But I've got an idea. It's a very useful thing sometimes, an idea. - Superintendent Battle

The cook looked as if she could grill Mr. Superintendent alive on a furnace, and the other women looked as if they could eat him when he was done.

God's grace is the most incredible and insurmountable truth ever to be revealed to the human heart, which is why God has given us His Holy Spirit to superintend the process of more fully revealing the majesty of the work done on our behalf by our Savior. He teaches us to first cling to, and then enables us to adore with the faith He so graciously supplies, the mercy of God. This mercy has its cause and effect in the work of Jesus on the cross. 13.

One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: “I don’t know why I am telling you all of this. It’s none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge’s business either. It was a purely family affair.

Out of absolutely nowhere I felt a sudden, sweet shot of joy, piercing and distilled as the jolt I imagine heroin users get when the fix hits the vein. It was my partner bracing herself on her hands as she slid fluidly off the desk, it was the neat practiced movement of flipping my notebook shut one-handed, it was my superintendent wriggling into his suit jacket and covertly checking his shoulders for dandruff, it was the garishly lit office with a stack of marker-labeled case files sagging in the corner and evening rubbing up against the window. It was the realization, all over again, that this was real and it was my life. Maybe Katy Devlin, if she had made it that far, would have felt this way about blisters on her toes, the pungent smell of sweat and floor wax in the dance studios, the early-morning breakfast bells raced down echoing corridors. Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

Anybody who can belive six impossible things before breakfast wins hands down in this game.

I suppose, like most young people nowadays, boredom is what you dread most in the world, and yet, I can assure you, there are worse things.

My father and mother did not think they should have brought a superintendent into the world.

Program your life the way you want it to be: don't waste the unuse energy that lodges in the matrix of your soul. You are transcendent, be a superintendent.

What a lot of funny people it does take to make a world.

When I want to get anywhere, I usually do.

He once suggested the idea of concealed carry to his superiors. In their infinite wisdom, the principal, his assistants, and the superintendent nixed the idea. Joey wonders: How do they feel about the idea now?

So, you are not so much interested in exploring your feelings about Joy's betrayal. Or the failure of your relationship. You are merely giving me a tour of the museum.' 'The museum? ... I don't follow you.' 'Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.' 'I, uh...' 'We all superintend such a place, I suppose,' she said, 'although some of us are more painstaking curators than others. That is the category in which I would certainly put you, Dominick. You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you.

It's extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often - both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.

In my opinion half the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They're no good.

Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.

Mrs. Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the church; but partaking of the Lord’s supper did not seem to

Hercule Poirot stared hard at Superintendent Sugden’s moustache. Its luxuriance seemed to fascinate him.

THE Superintendent said to me: "I only keep you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago." I replied to him: "You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.

Imagine a problem in psychology: to find a way of getting people in our day and age - Christians, humanitarians, nice, kind people - to commit the most heinous crimes without feeling any guilt. There is only one solution - doing just what we do now: you make them governors, superintendents, officers or policemen, a process which, first of all, presupposes acceptance of something that goes by the name of government service and allows people to be treated like inanimate objects, precluding any humane or brotherly relationships, and, secondly, ensures that people working for this government service must be so interdependent that responsibility for any consequences of the way they treat people never devolves on any one of them individually.

He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odor nor perfume—just strange, and curiously exciting. “Superintendent, what’s that smell? Casey noticed it too, the moment Sven opened the door.” Armstrong hesitated. Then he smiled. “That’s Hong Kong’s very own, Mr. Bartlett. It’s money.

It's a rotten job, but somebody's got to do it.

Men have courage-one knows that...but they are more easily deceived than women.

I mean that if you are not absolutely sure of a thing, it is so difficult to commit yourself to a definite course of action.

As far as it is possible for one upright Christian gentleman to dislike another upright Christian gentleman, Lord Caterham disliked the Hon. George Lomax.

No woman respects a man when he's doing a thing thoroughly badly.

Nothing could quiet a happy crowd of kids like Mr. Holgren's unannounced appearance -- he loved superintending; he was made for it. So when he marched in that morning with a determined look on his face, we froze. Boys and girls recognize sinister as handily as dogs do. Here it was. My best guess now is he'd got it in his head to try "relating" to us -- but when he produced a paper pilgrim's hat from behind his back and put it on his own head, I think we all nearly bolted.

Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.

I'm the kind of person who marries enthusiastically if they marry at all.

But that's the worst of these attractive young women with affectionate dispositions. They'll say anything, and they mean absolutely nothing by it.

superintend

Do you mean to tell me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency.

A school superintendent once told me that most educators define "a Christian teacher" as strictly in terms of personal behavior: things like setting a good example and showing concern for the students. Almost none define it in terms of conveying a biblical worldview on the subjects they teach, whether literature, science, social studies, or the arts. In other words, they are concerned about being a Christian *in* their work, but they don't think in terms of having a biblical framework *on* the work itself.

Responding to the claim that not just reading but "high culture" in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, "many people were indeed deep in high culture, but . . . this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe." If reading really was supposed to "make you a better person," then "when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps . . . to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do." So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone's character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." Nevertheless, I am going to argue . . . that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read . . . but also why and how.

In my opinion,” said the Superintendent slowly, “an arm-chair review of a case is often far more profitable than any number of enquiries and cross-examinations. You get a better perspective. More wood. Fewer trees.

...the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference.

If he had but a little more brains, she thought to herself, I might make something of him; but she never let him perceive the opinion she had of him; listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of the stable and the mess; laughed at all his jokes...When he came home, she was alert and happy; when he went out she pressed him to go; when he stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks, superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in comfort. The best of women {I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smile which they wear so easily are traps to cajole or elude or disarm--I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models and paragons of female virute.

Mrs. Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the church; but partaking of the Lord’s supper did not seem to put her in a Christian frame of mind. If dinner was not served at the exact time on

We can talk in here.” Dodgson led him to a glass-walled superintendent’s booth, in the center of the building. The glass cut down the sound of the barking. But through the windows, they could look out at the rows of animals.

Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father! It is as I tell you. He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same.

What I think is a different matter. Maybe I think some rather curious things—but until thinking's got you somewhere it's no use talking about it.

For, once there's a death, one doesn't like to think there's been harsh words spoken and no chance of taking them back.

It has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.

I don't like anyone who comes and dies in my house on purpose to annoy me," said Lord Caterham obstinately.

But, mind you, very few people would understand that point of view. Most people, you see, haven't got any imagination

Our Lord took on a body like ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and capacity of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.

I see." Gamache lowered his voice, though all could still hear the words. "When I was Chief Superintendent, I had a framed poster in my office. On it were the last words of a favorite poet, Seamus Heaney. Noli timere. It's Latin. Do you know what it means?" He looked around the room. "Neither did I," he admitted when no one spoke. "I had to look it up. It means 'Be Not Afraid.' His eyes returned to the unhappy young agent. "In this job you'll have to do things that scare you. You might be afraid, but you must be brave. When I ask you to do something, you must trust there's a good reason. And I need to trust that you will do it. D'accord?

Expect me when you see me.

... he said "I simply can't believe it, that's all." "Oh, nonsense," said Jimmy. "You must get into the habit of believing six impossible things before breakfast...

It's no good going back over the past. It's the future one has to live for.

But nothing will suit him now but the best! He's got on wonderfully, and naturally he wants something to show for it, but many's the time I wonder where it will end.

Whether he acted rightly or not, I have never been sure. It was the future of a child that was at stake. A child, he felt, ought to be given the benefit of a doubt.

I often find these self-made men are inconsiderate. Very possibly that is why they amass such large fortunes.

Never display emotion.

They were silent with the comfortable silence of two people who know each other very well indeed.

Always looks as though she's seeing things other people don't see. But she's got a lot of character. She makes herself felt, as you might say.

Borrowed from my former superintendent of schools: 'Change is inevitable, growth is optional.

Not even the Superintendent could play about with gravity.

Our superintendence in instruction and discipline is the office of the Word, from whom we learn frugality and humility, and all that pertains to love of truth, love of humanity, and love of excellence. And so, in a word, being assimilated to God by participation in moral excellence, we must not retrograde into carelessness and sloth. But labor, and faint not.

I have abstained from expressing any opinion, so far," says Mr. Superintendent, with his military voice still in good working order. "I have now only one remark to offer, on leaving this case in your hands. There IS such a thing, Sergeant, as making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Good-morning." "There is also such a thing as making nothing out of a mole-hill, in consequence of your head being too high to see it." Having returned his brother-officer's compliment in those terms, Sergeant Cuff wheeled about, and walked away to the window by himself.

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements, and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world," - all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.

The managers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them. A poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been working in Durham's for twenty years at a salary of six dollars a week, and might work there for twenty more and do no better, would yet consider himself a gentleman, as far removed as the poles from the most skilled worker on the killing beds; he would dress differently, and live in another part of the town, and come to work at a different hour of the day, and in every way make sure that he never rubbed elbows with a laboring man. Perhaps this was due to the repulsiveness of the work; at any rate, the people who worked with their hands were a class apart, and were made to feel it.

So, you are not so much interested in exploring your feelings about Joy’s betrayal. Or the failure of your relationship. You are merely giving me a tour of the museum.” “The museum? . . . I don’t follow you.” “Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.” “I, uh . . .” “We all superintend such a place, I suppose,” she said, “although some of us are more painstaking curators than others. That is the category in which I would certainly put you, Dominick. You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer, we could call you a scrupulous coroner.

Here was Durham's, for instance, owned by a man who was trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible. And all the men of the same rank were pitted against each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of

Second: them poor things well out o' this, and never no more will I interfere with Mrs. Cruncher's flopping, never no more!" "Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be," said Miss Pross, striving to dry her eyes and compose herself, "I have no doubt it is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under her own superintendence.—O my poor darlings!" "I go so far as to say, miss, moreover," proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with a most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit—"and let my words be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself—that wot my opinions respectin' flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present time." "There, there, there! I hope she is, my dear man," cried the distracted Miss Pross, "and I hope she finds it answering her expectations.

Mr. Hargraves who was superintendent of schools made a speech before the flight. He told about how the invention of the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

if we still will adhere to the design of a national government, or, which is the same thing, of a superintending power, under the direction of a common council, we must resolve to incorporate into our plan those ingredients which may be considered as forming the characteristic difference between a league and a government; we must extend the authority of the Union to the persons of the citizens,—the only proper objects of government.

I’ve grasped that,' said Bundle. 'I’m not a fool.' 'No,' said Superintendent Battle. 'Never knew a young lady who was less so. What I’ll do for you, Lady Eileen, is this. I’ll just give you one little hint. And I’m doing it because I never have thought much of the motto ‘Safety First.’ In my opinion all the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They’re no good.

Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated in the letter which I wrote to you three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite the character and disposition I could wish: should you admit her into Lowood school, I should be glad if the superintendent and teachers were requested to keep a strict eye on her, and, above all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit.  I mention this in your hearing, Jane, that you may not attempt to impose on Mr. Brocklehurst.

While that may be true, we really should be on our way. We've got that experiment we need to check on in the laboratory. Remember?' 'Actually, you're wrong again, my dear.' I was so mad I could scream some of the worst obscenities I'd heard at the docks at him. He was ruining our exit strategy, and I was most certainly not his dear. When I thought all hope was lost, Thomas checked his watch. 'We should've left precisely three minutes and twenty-three seconds ago. If we don't run now, our experiment will be destroyed.' He turned to the editor and superintendent. 'It's been as pleasant as a fast day in Lent, gentlemen.' By the time they figured out his parting was, in fact, an insult, we were already rushing out through the bustling newsroom.

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. That have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix the schools, they'll fix the kids." So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test-prep time. Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminated recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Meanwhile, Georgia's governor wanted the state to give Mozart CDs to newborns because research showed Mozart improved babies' IQs (which later proved to be mythical research). Right behind him is Lincoln, Rhode Island, where they canceled the district spelling bee because only one child would win, leaving all others behind, thus violating the intent of No Child Left Behind--or, as they might say in Lincoln, no child gets ahead.

She doesn’t have any terrific talent for acting, but that’s how it appears to go. People don’t do what they have a talent for but what the preoccupation leads to. If they’re good at auto-repairing they have to sing Don Giovanni; if they can sing they have to be architects; and if they have a gift for architecture they wish to become school superintendents or abstract painters or anything else. Anything! It’s a spite. It’s having to prove full and ultimate self-sufficiency or some such monster dream that you don’t need anyone else to do these things for you.

For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systematic course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand. The hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities, whether there was no female then domiciled in 'the house' who was in a situation to impart to Oliver Twist, the consolation and nourishment of which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with humility, that there was not. Upon this, the parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be 'farmed,' or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week. Sevenpence-halfpenny's worth per week is a good round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable. The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself. So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was originally provided for them. Thereby finding in the lowest depth a deeper still; and proving herself a very great experimental philosopher.

I was drawing near to the curve of the track; already the twelve hooves of those dead horses were visible in the distance, jutting towards the sky like the columns in the cathedral crypt at Stará Boleslav. I thought of Masha, and of how we met for the first time, when I was still with the track superintendent. He gave us two buckets of red paint and told us to paint the fence round the entire state workshops. Masha began by the railway track, just as I did. We stood facing each other with the tall wire fence between us, at our feet we each had a bucket of cinnabar paint, we each had a brush, and we stippled away with our brushes opposite each other and painted that fence, she from her side and I from mine. There were four kilometres altogether of this fence; for five months we stood facing each other like this, and there wasn't anything we didn't say to each other, Masha and I, but always there was this fence between us. After we'd painted two kilometres of it, one day I'd done just as high as Masha's mouth with this red colour, and I told her that I loved her, and she, from her side, had painted just up to there, too, and she said that she loved me, too ... and she looked into my eyes, and, as this was in a ditch and among tall goosefoot plants, I put out my lips, and we kissed through the newly painted fence, and when we opened our eyes she had a sort of tiny red fence-pale striped across her mouth, and so had I, and we burst out laughing, and from that moment on we were happy.

Today's politicians are like policemen on traffic duty. They are just dealing with traffic right in front of them. Yet they want to be the Superintendent based on that alone. The politicians and the bigwigs in finance have no ambition. There are too many who confuse the power that they got by their position as their own ability.

After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort—the bosses grafted off the men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft off the boss. Warming to the subject, Tamoszius went on to explain the situation. Here was Durham's, for instance, owned by a man who was trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible. And all the men of the same rank were pitted against each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of jealousies and hatreds; there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a dollar. And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any honesty. The reason for that? Who could say? It must have been old Durham in the beginning; it was a heritage which the self-made merchant had left to his son, along with his millions.

The Ann Arbor superintendent ridicules what he describes as “simple-minded solutions [that attempt] to make things equal.” But, of course, the need is not “to make things equal.” He would be correct to call this “simple-minded.” Funding and resources should be equal to the needs that children face. The children of Detroit have greater needs than those of children in Ann Arbor. They should get more than children in Ann Arbor, more than kids in Bloomfield Hills or Birmingham. Calling ethics “simple-minded” is consistent with the tendency to label obvious solutions, that might cost us something, unsophisticated and to favor more diffuse solutions that will cost us nothing and, in any case, will not be implemented.

Different kinds of danger suit different kinds of people...

It wasn't until the show was almost over that I figured out what it was: the crack above my David Onica that I had asked the doorman to tell the superintendent to fix. On my way out this morning, I stopped at the front desk, about to complain to the doorman, when I was confronted with a NEW doorman, my age but balding and homely and FAT. Three glazed jelly doughnuts AND two steaming cups of extra-dark HOT CHOCOLATE lay on the desk in front of him beside a copy of the Post opened to the comics and it struck me that I was infinitely better-looking, more successful and richer than this poor bastard would ever be and so with a passing rush of sympathy I smiled and nodded a curt though not impolite good morning without lodging a complaint.

And is not life to be reckoned among the ends of the soul? Assuredly, he said. And has not the soul an excellence also? Yes. And can she or can she not fulfil her own ends when deprived of that excellen- ce? She cannot. Then an evil soul must necessarily be an evil ruler and superintendent, and the good soul a good ruler? Yes, necessarily. And we have admitted that justice is the excellence of the soul, and injustice the defect of the soul? That has been admitted. Then the just soul and the just man will live well, and the unjust man will live ill? That is what your argument proves. And he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who lives ill the reverse of happy? Certainly. Then the just is happy, and the unjust miserable? So be it. But happiness and not misery is profitable. Of course. Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable than justice.

When I was reaching out to those young men through Strachan’s Corner, nobody told me what to do, I was doing it from my heart. I did what I thought was best rather than giving those youngsters a police record, I tried to prevent it by letting them know if you commit crime you are going to get yourself in trouble. Then you will be confined to the Bahamas for the rest of your life, and will not see that great big world out there. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

In March 2015, sixteen accused policemen were acquitted of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre, making minorities even more cynical about the promises of justice from secular parties. The case dated back to 1987 when riots had erupted in Meerut. Men from UP’s Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) dragged out young Muslim men, most of them poor daily wagers and weavers, drove them to the Upper Ganga Canal in Ghaziabad instead of to the police station, and threw them in one by one. V. N. Rai, who was superintendent of police in Ghaziabad, wrote a chilling account of how the police—who described Meerut as a ‘mini Pakistan’ and held the Muslims solely responsible for the violence—had behaved. ‘Every survivor who hit the ground after being shot at tried hard to pretend he is dead and most hanged on the canal’s embankments with their heads in water and the body clutched by weeds to show to their killers that they were dead and no more gunshots fired at them. Even after the PAC personnel had left, they lay still between water, blood and slush. They were too scared and numbed even to help those who were still alive or half dead.

the factory warden had little choice but to send the bodies to the local cemetery to be disposed of during that period. Six Haftlings died within that time frame. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of victims of Nazi atrocities across Europe had been dumped into mass graves, but, according to what we read next, this local cemetery superintendent took it upon himself to do something. Something extraordinary. This cemetery superintendent – this good, decent man – took each of those six deceased Bochum factory workers and laid him in an individual, marked grave in the Wiemelhausen Jewish Cemetery.

What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces. The final surrender was by “four hundred English and Negroes in Armes” at one garrison, and three hundred “freemen and African and English bondservants” in another garrison. The naval commander who subdued the four hundred wrote: “Most of them I persuaded to go to their Homes, which accordingly they did, except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their Armes.” All through those early years, black and white slaves and servants ran away together, as shown both by the laws passed to stop this and the records of the courts. In 1698, South Carolina passed a “deficiency law” requiring plantation owners to have at least one white servant for every six male adult Negroes. A letter from the southern colonies in 1682 complained of “no white men to superintend our negroes, or repress an insurrection of negroes. . . .” In 1691, the House of Commons received “a petition of divers merchants, masters of ships, planters and others, trading to foreign plantations . . . setting forth, that the plantations cannot be maintained without a considerable number of white servants, as well to keep the blacks in subjection, as to bear arms in case of invasion.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress-tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some pan or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's-- the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

I asked, “When the Rebellions were at its peak doing nonsense, everyone was trying to keep away from the area, yet you were going in, why were you going into that area? Supt. Strachan answered quite frankly, Because I was not afraid. I felt like they are my people, they are my color. I don’t know of anyone born after me that I should be afraid of, that was how I felt. I knew I could’ve walk through Strachan’s Corner, sit down and felt at home, and their parents also accepted me. I came to the conclusion; these kids just need someone to show them some attention. They just wanted to belong, that was what a lot of them were looking for. So I said to myself, if I could assist them I would, and that was what I did. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.

We stayed two days at Streatley, and got our clothes washed.  We had tried washing them ourselves, in the river, under George’s superintendence, and it had been a failure.  Indeed, it had been more than a failure, because we were worse off after we had washed our clothes than we were before.  Before we had washed them, they had been very, very dirty, it is true; but they were just wearable.  After we had washed them—well, the river between Reading and Henley was much cleaner, after we had washed our clothes in it, than it was before.  All the dirt contained in the river between Reading and Henley, we collected, during that wash, and worked it into our clothes. The washerwoman at Streatley said she felt she owed it to herself to charge us just three times the usual prices for that wash.  She said it had not been like washing, it had been more in the nature of excavating. We paid the bill without a murmur.

Postscript, 2005 From the Publisher ON APRIL 7, 2004, the Mid-Hudson Highland Post carried an article about an appearance that John Gatto made at Highland High School. Headlined “Rendered Speechless,” the report was subtitled “Advocate for education reform brings controversy to Highland.” The article relates the events of March 25 evening of that year when the second half of John Gatto’s presentation was canceled by the School Superintendent, “following complaints from the Highland Teachers Association that the presentation was too controversial.” On the surface, the cancellation was in response to a video presentation that showed some violence. But retired student counselor Paul Jankiewicz begged to differ, pointing out that none of the dozens of students he talked to afterwards were inspired to violence. In his opinion, few people opposing Gatto had seen the video presentation. Rather, “They were taking the lead from the teacher’s union who were upset at the whole tone of the presentation.” He continued, “Mr. Gatto basically told them that they were not serving kids well and that students needed to be told the truth, be given real-life learning experiences, and be responsible for their own education. [Gatto] questioned the validity and relevance of standardized tests, the prison atmosphere of school, and the lack of relevant experience given students.” He added that Gatto also had an important message for parents: “That you have to take control of your children’s education.” Highland High School senior Chris Hart commended the school board for bringing Gatto to speak, and wished that more students had heard his message. Senior Katie Hanley liked the lecture for its “new perspective,” adding that ”it was important because it started a new exchange and got students to think for themselves.” High School junior Qing Guo found Gatto “inspiring.” Highland teacher Aliza Driller-Colangelo was also inspired by Gatto, and commended the “risk-takers,” saying that, following the talk, her class had an exciting exchange about ideas. Concluded Jankiewicz, the students “were eager to discuss the issues raised. Unfortunately, our school did not allow that dialogue to happen, except for a few teachers who had the courage to engage the students.” What was not reported in the newspaper is the fact that the school authorities called the police to intervene and ‘restore the peace’ which, ironically enough, was never in the slightest jeopardy as the student audience was well-behaved and attentive throughout. A scheduled evening meeting at the school between Gatto and the Parents Association was peremptorily forbidden by school district authorities in a final assault on the principles of free speech and free assembly… There could be no better way of demonstrating the lasting importance of John Taylor Gatto’s work, and of this small book, than this sorry tale. It is a measure of the power of Gatto’s ideas, their urgency, and their continuing relevance that school authorities are still trying to shut them out 12 years after their initial publication, afraid even to debate them. — May the crusade continue! Chris Plant Gabriola Island, B.C. February, 2005