My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain't easy. There are ...so few truth-speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of "Western civilization" has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that it releases the Spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that equates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility with naive idealism, that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams ... then you must still regard America today with the same naive ent...husiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems ...as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically r...esolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must abandon completely the naive faith that school automatically liberates the mind and serves the cause of human progress; in... fact, we know that it may serve any cause. [It] may serve tyranny as well as truth, war as well as peace, death as well as life . . . whether it is good or evil depends, not on the laws of learning, but on the conception of life and civilization that gives it substance and direction. In the course of history, education has served every purpose and doctrine contrived by man. If it is to serve the cause of human freedom, it must be explicitly designed for that purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward i...mmortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who wants always to look at a cafe or an altar or an oak tree with the first innocence and the limited understanding of a naive lo...vesick girl, or a born-again Byron? Five minutes or five centuries from now, we will see changeless realities with new eyes, and the sounds of sheep bleating and a new child's wail will be the same but heard through new ears. How can we pretend to be changeless, then?... Is it wrong to see the phony, painted mushroom-bollard on the quay and accept it, as part of the whole strong song that keeps on singing there, in spite of wars and movies and the turtling-on of time?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adolescents often behave much like members of an old-fashioned aristocracy. They maintain private rituals, which they often do not... really understand themselves. They are extremely conservative in their dress and tastes, but the conventions to which they adhere are purely those of their own social group; they try to ignore the norms of the larger society if these conflict with their own. They can be extravagantly generous and extravagantly cruel, but rarely petty or conniving. Their virtues are courage and loyalty; while even the necessity for even a moderate degree of compromise humiliates them greatly. They tend to be pugnacious and quarrelsome about what they believe to be their rights, but naive and reckless in defending them. They are shy, but not modest. If they become very anxious they are likely to behave eccentrically, to withdraw, or to attack with some brutality; they are less likely to blend themselves innocuously into the environment with an apologetic smile. They are honest on occasions when even a stupid adult would have better sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enlightenment codified the vision of the world as a unified, self-sufficient Nature, governed by orderly laws, and including m...an within itself as a part of Nature and nothing else. It is the codification, in outline, of the world we now inhabit. The supposition that the Enlightenment is but a kind of continuation and completion of the Reformation is sometimes attacked as naive and over-intellectualist. Yet the logical connection is obviously there: the notion that it is legitimate to scrutinize the claims of a self-proclaimed sacred institution, by checking it against the independent testimony of scripture, would seem to lead naturally to the idea that everything, including scripture itself, can be scrutinized in the light of the independent testimony of "Reason" or fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »