Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither ... can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath t...he heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll... on society--a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize. This knowledge concerns every single one of us, and--if disseminated widely enough--should lead to fundamental changes in society; above all, to a halt in the blind escalation of violence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as t...hey are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had reconciled myself to a life without marriage or children for the sake of my career. And then my brothers got married. I real...ized I didn't even have a home, that in the future I couldn't do politics when I had to ask permission from their wives as to whether I could use the dining room or the telephone. I couldn't rent a home because a woman living on her own can be suspected of all kinds of scandalous associations. So keeping in mind that many people in Pakistan looked to me, I decided to make a personal sacrifice in what I thought would be, more or less, a loveless marriage, a marriage of convenience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I said, "That was a very brave thing to do." He said, "Och, it was just the training." I have a feeling that, in the end, probably... that is the answer to a great many things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How can we help a child change from undependable to dependable, from a mediocre student to a capable student, from someone who won...'t amount to very much to someone who will count for something. The answer is at once both simple and complicated: We treat a child as if he already is what we would like him to become.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am always glad to think that my education was, for the most part, informal, and had not the slightest reference to a future busi...ness career. It left me free and untrammeled to approach my business problems without the limiting influence of specific training.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scientists tend to be ... Utopian in temperament--to believe in the possibility in principle, perhaps even in fact, of a different... and altogether better world. The great days of Utopian thinking were the days when voyages of discovery on the earth's surface had the same significance as space travel has today. The old Utopias--New Atlantis, Christianopolis and the City of the Sun--were faraway contemporary societies, but the Utopias men dream of today lie in the distant future or on a planet of a distant faraway sun. Arcadian thinking looks not forward nor far away but backward to a golden age that could yet return. Arcadia is a world of innocence not yet corrupted by ambition and inquiry, a world of pious acquiescence in the established order of things, without strife and without ambition--a world of "truth and honest living." Milton, whom I quote, saw it as the purpose of education "to repair the ruins of our first parents," to return to the happy innocence of the world before the Fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »