Toby's Random Quotes Of Unknown Interest
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee
Or again on the curriculum: it was unecessary to make even such search
into this as I made to know that there is no setting before the
students of "economic" or "social" or "political" "facts" and of their
situation within these "facts," no attempt made to clarify or even
slightly to relieve the situation between white and Negro races, far less
to explain the sources, no attempt to clarify psychological situations in
the individual, in his family, or in his world, no attempt to get beneath
and to revise those "ethical" and "social" pressures and beliefs in which
even a young child is trapped, no attempt, beyond the most nominal, to
interest a child in using or discovering his senses and judgment, no attempt
to counteract the paralytic quality inherent in "authority," no attempt
beyond the most nominal and stifling to awaken, to protect, or to "guide"
the sense of investigation, the sense of joy, the sense of beauty, no attempt
to clarify spoken and written words whose power of deceit at the simplest is
vertiginous, no attempt, or very little, and ill taught, to teach even the
earliest techniques of improvement in occupation ("scientific farming,"
diet and cooking, skilled trades), nor to "teach" a child in terms of his
environment, no attempt, beyond the most suffocated, to awaken a student
either to "religion" or "irreligion," not attempt to develop in him either
"skepticism" or "faith," nor "wonder," nor mental "honesty" nor mental
"courage," nor any understanding of or delicateness in "the emotions" and
in any of the uses and pleasures of the body save the athletic; no attempt
either to relieve him of fear and of poison in sex or to release in him a
free beginning of pleasure in it, nor to open within him the illimitable
potentials of grief, of danger, and of goodness in sex and in sexual love,
nor to give him the beginnings at the very least of a knowledge, and of an
attitude, whereby he may hope to guard and increase himself and those whom
he touches, no indication of the damages which society, money, law, fear
and quick belief have set upon these matters and upon all things in human
life, nor of their causes, nor of the alternate ignorances and possibilities
of ruin or of joy, no fear of doubtlessness, no fear of the illusions of
knowledge , no fear of compromise.
- Quote on Prohibition, by Abraham Lincoln
Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to
control a man's appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that
are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon
which our government was founded.
- Quote by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carrol)
It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
- Quote by Theodore Roosevelt
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs,
though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who
neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight
that knows not victory nor defeat.
- Rockin' In The Free World, by Neil Young (excerpt
from)
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand
We got department stores
And toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people
Says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn
Got roads to drive
Keep on rockin' in the free world
That's all for now folks...
November 5, 1995 / toby@ovod-everett.org,
Return to my homepage.