#mit

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#education #feminism #knowledge-power #quip #school

And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anti-semitism #christmas #civilisation #daniel-pearl #detroit

If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress. ↗

— Calvin Coolidge

#cannot #discourage #ever #failures #had

Each is under the most sacred obligation not to squander the material committed to him, not to sap his strength in folly and vice, and to see at the least that he delivers a product worthy the labor and cost which have been expended on him. ↗

— Anna Julia Cooper

#committed #cost #delivers #each #expended

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. ↗

— Jackie Cooper

#dying #good #good work #half-hour #hope

If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#asks #disappear #existence #give #higher

I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. ↗

— Nicolaus Copernicus

#am #aware #because #endeavour #extent

I've been stocking my nuts away like a squirrel for 15 years. I don't have kids, I don't have a wife. I own my own house. I don't owe anybody for it so I put my nuts away. I really made a commitment to myself to just do what I like to do and want to do, and not to do anything. I'm not even going to give six weeks away for money anymore, you know? ↗

— John Corbett

#anymore #anything #away #been #commitment

We believe that marriage, by its very definition, can exist only between a man and a woman. Moreover, study after study - not to mention common sense - show that children fare better in life when raised in a home with a loving father and mother in a stable, committed relationship. ↗

— Salvatore J. Cordileone

#believe #better #between #children #committed

In the beginning, though, I have to admit that I did have a chip on my shoulder. I did want to prove everyone wrong. But after I went through the process and came out the other side, it wasn't about anyone else. ↗

— Billy Corgan

#admit #after #anyone #beginning #came