Quote collection
13 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity."
"To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death."
"The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness."
"Human beings have the capacity to learn to want almost any conceivable material object. Given, then, the emergence of a modern industrial culture capable of producing almost anything, the time is ripe for opening the storehouse of infinite need!... It is the modern Pandora's box, and its plagues are loose upon the world."
"The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape, Homo Sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern."
"If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!"
"The paradox of the human condition is expressed more in education than elsewhere in human culture, because learning to learn has been and continues to be Homo Sapiens' most formidable evolutionary task... It must also be clear that we will never quite learn how to learn, for since Homo Sapiens is self-changing, and since the more culture changes the faster it changes, man's methods and rate of learning will never quite keep pace with his need to learn."
"Up to a certain point anxiety is good, for it promotes action. Beyond that point we freeze any fixed attitudes or rush about without thinking deeply from one decision to another."
"A competitive culture endures by tearing people down."
"I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals"
"Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread"
"My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today"
"Most of the doctors in the Tunisian administration, especially those in country districts, contracted typhus and approximately one third of them died of it"