Quotations IV
Poverty is not the problem. Wealth is the problem. Poverty is the solution.
Satish Kumar, Editor, "Resurgence," September-October, 1999 www.resurgence.org
The wealthy make of poverty a vice. Plato
The corporatization of the world is how we both manifest and cover our collective compromises: It's nobody's fault, nobody's responsibility, we must do business in this new bland, soulless way because of corporatization - the market - while we refuse to acknowledge that a corporate vision is merely one individual compromise after another in which everything is judged by its value in money.
And all the while we writhe in the throes of a massive contradiction: We want the depths and consequent rigors of self-knowledge, while also expecting, as our due, the previously unheard-of luxuries that the corporatized Western world now confers... To live in a state of technological luxury you must accede, in a thousand ways, to the conditions and demands that create your affluence. How much of your self can you express without endangering your affluence? This is an essential question now in all spheres of life --- business, psychology, education, art, religion, science. The fact that this question is rarely asked --- or is asked with so many qualifications as to make the question meaningless --- is symptomatic not only of ambivalence but of cowardice. The more you try to fit in, the less you own yourself... and if you can't find a way to fit in, you face ruin... Michael Ventura
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious... you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels... to indicate to the people who run it,... that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. Thoreau
I've taught public school for 26 years but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. John Gatto
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. John Taylor Gatto
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. . . . 1. Confusion.
2. Class Position. 3. Indifference. 4. Emotional Dependency. 5. Intellectual Dependency. 6. Provisional Self-Esteem. 7. One Can't Hide. from John Taylor Gatto's speech upon accepting the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year Award. The entire text is found in Gatto's "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992)
Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. John Gatto
This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle that the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," 1879
In large part, American politics is a fiefdom of the wealthy because "government franchise schools" mold the nation's intellect, character and behavior. It is baffling that the left -- especially the radical left -- supposes that a nation which does everything wrong in health care, race relations, foreign policy, military spending, globalization, welfare, the prison system etc. will, mirabile dictu, do a splendid job of education our young if only we authorize more spending on compulsory government instruction. (It is an inconvenient fact that the Washington D.C. Public School District spends over $9000.00 per student per year.) The belief that public schools undergird democracy fails the straight face test. Public schools are an essential mechanism for perpetuating the dysfunction that characterizes society at large. Giving the government a monopoly on education is like putting the Pope in charge of Planned Parenthood. How did so many people
- from across the political spectrum - come to assume that public schools are the sine qua non of educational virtue? Perhaps group delusion is so total on this issue that to think otherwise rattles the underpinnings of individual identity, threatening uncontrollable psychological upheaval: "If I was so wrong - for so long - on such a fundamental issue as public schooling, who knows what else I may have mistaken?" I'm reminded that the Buddha, when asked about the nature of his "realization," simply said "I am awake." The word "Budda" - from the Sanskrit "bodhi" - means "awake." While one might argue what "awake" meant for Buddha, it clearly suggests that the rest of us have been lulled into deep sleep. Before we stir, who knows what dreams may come? Alan Archibald
The children who know how to think for themselves, spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone (would be) interdependent... Independent self-reliant people (would be) a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future... (where) people will be defined by their associations. John Dewey, proponent of modern public schools. 1896
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening... Average Americans (will be) content with their humble role in life because they're not tempted to think about any other role. William T. Harris, U.S. Comissioner of Education, 1889
Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future. Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar
Damn, we know that it's the schools and our parents that are crazy, not us. New York High School Free Press
Schools do not give a damn what students think. John Holt
We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. Hey teacher, leave the kids alone. Pink Floyd
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. Ralph Waldo Emerson
I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. Woody Allen
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so kept me out of school. Margaret Mead
Adults are obsolete children. Dr. Seuss
Unless you become like little children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Jesus of Nazareth
Neil Postman's book is about the problem of education not being so much "how" we teach or "what" we teach, but that we lack a substantial goal. We lack a metaphysic. If you do not understand what it means to lack a metaphysic, then this book is for you. It is one thing to lose something and know that we have lost it (a wallet, for example), but if we lose something (such as a sense for what a metaphysic is) and we don't even know it is lost, we will not even know enough to look for it. If we have lost the sense of our lives being ordered toward some end, then indeed we are permanently lost. And we are just teaching randomly and learning randomly, as we try to become better producers and better consumers. Is that what we are? Neil Postman says no. We are much more. I encourage every teacher who cares about teaching to read this book. I encourage every student who has wondered why we have to study so many unnecessary things, to read this book. It will help the teacher reorient his or her teaching and it will help the student articulate the pain and fear he or she feels upon entering a classroom, and the reasons for his or her boredom in the face of what ought to be adventurous learning about the world and about himself or herself. It will give the student words so he or she can stand up in class and demand something better. Peter Gilboy's review of "The End of Education, Redefining the Value of School" by Neil Postman. Postman begins by describing how schools early in the century sought to forge a coherent and unified culture from the diverse traditions, languages, and religions in the US. He then contrasts today's goals of economic utility, consumership, mechanical solutions, and separatist multiculturalism. www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~drc/critical_tools/e306_fall_1999/addlink/postman
Yet for all their wild profusion... the essential promise at the heart of the world's wisdom traditions is often moribund today in a way that it never was before. Real wisdom - the kind that once held individuals together and told them who they were and what they might become - seems to be retreating from us at precisely the speed that so many people suggest it is approaching... Wisdom... It is we who must commit ourselves to it and not the other way around. It is that call to unqualified investment -- commitment to the full course of the wisdom-getting project -- that has been lost in the modern wisdom smorgasbord. "Wisdom for Dummies," Ptolemy Tompkin, Utne Reader, January - February, 2000
Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.
Martin Luther King Jr. told us we must take the pain of moral progress upon ourselves, rather than inflict it upon others--what an amazing and ethical concept! And more amazing still, is the fact that it works better than any other method of social change (Our representatives) are all running on high-speed treadmills of fund-raising that give them time to listen only to big money lobbyists, and latitude to do only their bidding or do them no harm. Granny D. Haddock, a 90 year old woman who walked 3000 miles across the United States to address Congress on the evils of "big money."
We must be the change we want to see in the world. Gandhi
Baudrillard may have had a point in claiming "we live in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning."
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2000, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great, (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "AMERICA" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee. (By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.)
In any society where the State is the sole employer, opposition means death by slow starvation. Who does not obey, shall not eat. Leon Trotsky
Regarding the nationalization of industry or private property: "Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings." Adolf Hitler to Herman Rauschning, pre-WWII
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have. Gerald R. Ford
"Freiheit stirbt in kleinen Teilen." "Freedom dies in small pieces."
Before, we had 'crimes' that oppressed us. Now, we have 'laws' that oppress us. Roman Historian Tacitus, in 56 B.C.
Whatever you may say something is, it is not ! ... the map is not the territory ... the word is not the thing. Alfred Korzybski
There are others whose state of mind is still more extraordinary. They not only do not need the landscape to corroborate their history, but they do not care if the landscape contradicts their history... If the map marks the place as a waterless desert, they will declare it as dry as a bone, though the whole valley resound with the rushing river. A whole huge rock will be invisible if a little book on geology says it is impossible. This is at the opposite extreme to the irrational credultiy of the rustic, but it is infinitely more irrational... This great delusion of the prior claim of printed matter, as something anterior to experience and capable of contradicitng it, is the main weakness of modern urban society. The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one, anything that he could not find in the other. One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself; he was a man of too impatient a temper, and later he showed too hasty a disposition to tear the book up or toss the book away. But there had been granted to him a strange and high and heroic sort of faith. He could believe his eyes. G.K. Chesterton, "William Cobbett"
The whole is more than the sum of its parts" Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory
During the decade now beginning, we must learn a new language, a language that speaks not of development and underdevelopment but of true and false ideas about man, and his needs and his potential. Ivan Illich
'In 1926, the American novelist James Branch Cabell wrote, "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." The evidence of this century gives some support for the latter view.' Lester B. Pearson
'In his farewell address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1971, the retiring Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, Mr. Paul Hoffman, summed up the situation thus: "Far too much of our technological wizardry has been needlessly employed for exploiting the earth's resources, rather than for rationally using and continually replenishing them. And far too much of our technology has been applied without due consideration for its impact on the human spirit, on our cultures and on our ways of life. As a result, while technology has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to improve their material conditions, our planet is in many ways becoming a more dangerous and less humanly satisfying home-site for the entire race of man." There is not enough evidence to prove that Mr. Hoffman is too pessimistic.' Lester Pearson
Definition of a lecture: a means of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either. Graffiti at Warwick University
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep. Albert Camus
Hobbes, Kant, Locke and Mill believed "virtues are necessary to the origin of liberalism. Liberalism lives off the inheritance of pre-modern virtue without having the resources to replenish it. "Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism" by Peter Berkowitz, Princeton U. Press
Sex without religion is like an egg without salt. Luis Buñuel
What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism. Erasmus
'Perhaps the most important question I could ask my Christian friends who mistrust the Harry Potter books is this: is your concern about the portrayal of this imaginary magical technology matched by a concern for the effects of the technology in our world that displaced magic. The technocrats of this world hold in their hands power infinitely greater than those of Alban Dumbledown and Voldemort: how worried are we about them and their influence over our children? Not worried enough I would say. As Ellul (a French historian and critic of technology) suggests, the task for us is in "the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself," which measuring he also calls "the search for justice before God." Joan Rawling's books are more helpful than most in prompting such measurement. They are also and let's not forget the importance of this point a great deal of fun.' From "Harry Potter's Magic" by Alan Jacobs, "First Things," 1/2000
Humor seems to be the way we get to learn to live with our own brains. Eric Idle
"It's your life. Why should other people decide how you live?" Air Force advertisement
This morning, I was unexpectedly reminded that the Spanish word "apuro" means both "hurry" and "trouble."
Haste makes waste.
Time is money.
"A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of
nothing." Oscar Wilde
Even idleness is eager now. George Eliot
At the beginning of the road they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The lives of our ancestors, when we look back to them, appear to have been infinitely less troubled and momentous than our own - it is rather as if fate had designed us for the denouement of the drama in which we are acting." Andre Breton
The supremacy of the law of self-interest is the conclusion of Herbert Spencer's materialistic philosophy; and of the wretched pessimism of Hartmann and Schopenhauer. It is the principle upon which Cain slew his brother. It was the seductive whisper of the serpent in Eve's ear. It is the principle upon which crime is committed. It is the principle upon which the capitalist acts who treats labor as no more than a commodity subject to the lowest market rate and the law of supply and demand. It is the principle upon which railroads are bonded and bankrupted for private ends. It is the law by which money (is loaned to farmers at) usurious and impoverishing rate of interest It is the principle upon which a Chicago financier proceeds, with no more moral justification than the highwayman's robbery of an express train, to "corner" the pork market, and thus force from the mouths of toiling families a million and a half of dollars into his private treasury - a deed for which the giving of some thousands to found city missions and orphans' homes will be no atonement in the reckoning of the God who judges the world in righteousness and not by the ethics of the stock exchange. The law of self-interest is the eternal falsehood which mothers all social and private woes; for sin is pure individualism - the assertion of self against God and humanity. George D. Herron, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth," 22 September 1890 Occasion: An address delivered before the Minnesota Congregational Club, at its annual meeting held in Plymouth Church, Minneapolis, September 22, 1890
Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Anatole France
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak. G. K. Chesterton
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining
I believe in love even when I am alone
I believe in God even when He is silent.
(Written on a basement wall where a Jewish refugee had been hiding from agents of the Holocaust.)
It doesn't take money or power to be kind to a stranger, stand by a loved one, or fight injustice. ... We are free, each and every one of us, to determine our own history. To take responsibility for our life and the well-being of those around us.
-- Ron Jones, a Palo Alto high school gym teacher who accidentally started a fascist movement when trying to teach his students about the dangers of fascism.
Through and through the world is infected with quantity. To talk sense, is to talk in quantities. Albert North Whitehead
Statistics are the domain of death. Hilaire Belloc
Referring to the recent controversy at the Brooklyn Museum, Anna Quindlen bemoans that feeling of "déjà vu all over again." But what strikes me as truly redundant is the conventionally liberal mantra she reiterates. True, this is a tempest in a teapot. Equally true, there are other issues (like the health and well-being of our children) that are more urgent. But what if the elephant dung were included in a portrait of gay men? Or perhaps on the photograph of a civil-rights march? In that case, we'd receive a lecture about hate crimes. But in the present situation, not only is elephant dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary called art; it's also deemed worthy of taxpayer money. Steve Ramsey, Lebanon, Indiana, Newsweek, 11/09/99
You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself. Galileo Gallilei
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. Paul Simon
Men who have both made and given away millions testify that giving intelligently is much more difficult than making a fortune. We who are not rich may find that hard to believe, but we should be impressed by overwhelming agreement among those in a position to know. Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly
Money... It's actually harder to give it away intelligently than it is to make it. Ross Perot
The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution. Albert Einstein
Whether you believe you can or can't, you're right. Henry Ford.
In the movie "As Good as it Gets," a gushing secretary puts one hand on her head and another on her heart and asks Jack Nicholson, a wildly successful writer of romance novels: "How do you understand what goes on in here?" After a few facial contortions, Jack looks at the woman and says: "It's easy. I imagine a man, and then I take away reason and accountability."
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither--these make the finest company in the world. Logan Pearsall Smith
