Quotes


“We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike power” – E.O. Wilson,

  • Si non caste, tamen caute
  • audi alteram partem
  • SEOI as data, not knowledge
  • Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet; sapere aude, incipe. (“He who has begun is half done; dare to know; begin!”)
  • “Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it” — Mike Tyson
  • “The fastest way to learn is to be slightly wrong in public.” — Patrick O’Shaughnessy
  • “The narrower a mans mind, the broader his statements.” — Charles Dickens 
  • “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov (c.1960) [37]
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
  • The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ~ Bertrand Russell
  • The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing ~ Socrates
  • Both books and TV bring you somewhere, but with a book you are the driver whereas with TV you are a passenger – KF
  • Philosophy dfn: “An attempt to apply the whole of our experience to any part of our experience. That is, to see things in a large perspective”
  • We are “A little drop of water trying to understand the sea while writing enormous volumes about that drop of water.”

It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you got to do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.

Jogging Baboon, in Bojack Horseman
  • “Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with the voice trembling but start. Start and don’t stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just…start.” – Ijeoma Umebinyuo
  • “The ideal subject of totalitarianism is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (474)
  • It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery it makes them feel bigger” – Robert Louis Stevenson: On friendship (1910)
  • “He who knows best knows how little he knows. ~ Thomas Jefferson
  • “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” ~ Charles Darwin The Descent of Man
  • The terms tactic and strategy are often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational patterns, activity, and decision-making that govern tactical execution.
  • And for one unencrypted moment (Volokh), I was myself.
  • Camus: the unreasonable silence of the world

Here was a man who was either in total harmony with his nature or had beaten it into perfect submission

Richard Russo, Empire Falls
  • “education is the canvas on which our understanding may be drawn” Source
  • “A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.” ― Mark Twain
  • You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you. – Robert Anton Wilson
  • Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind? – Elliot Mishler
  • “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made – John Godfrey Sax
  • Show me a man with both feet on the ground and I’ll show you a man who can’t get his pants on. Joe E. Lewis
  • ‘Goddammit, you should listen to my fifty-eight years of experience; but what he had was one year of experience repeated fifty-eight times.” The Drifters – James Michener
  • “A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.” – Oliver Goldsmith 

“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Robert Ardrey
  • “The Irish do have a despairing quality of gaiety, but they have also a dour and brooding ghost that rides on their shoulders and peers in on their thoughts. Let them laugh too loudly, it sticks a long finger down their throats. They condemn themselves before they are charged, and this makes them defensive always.” — Steinbeck EoE
  • “The English can love people without their being seven foot tall or a hundred years dead.” – Brendan Behan
  • I was born in Ireland in 1979 for something I didn’t do; I was innocent, but they gave me life – KF?
  • Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom. – Theodore Isaac Rubin
  • “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence” – David Hume
  • ‘The public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.’ – Walter Lippmann
  • “Policy is a way to stop thinking about something” – JoTo
  • Survival of the fittest is a famous phrase of Herbert Spencer // Darwin = ‘natural selection’
  • Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk. – Doug Larson
  • responsibility breeds moderation – Thomas Jefferson
  • As Dr. Henry Jones Jr. famously observed: “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.” – KF

eople, in general, want convenience from their technology, not morality. So instead of building a more ethical version of the past, we need to build a more suitable version of the future. 

Ben Werdmüller: Building decentralized social media
  • obnubilate: “memories obnubilated by the passage of time”

You must see now that your incapacity of being alone:  your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others:  your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration:  the unfortunate accident—­for I like to think it was no more—­that you had not been able to acquire the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion merely—­that all these things, combined with the fact that your desires and your interests were in Life, not in Art, were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist. ― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

“It is true that freedom, when it is made up principally of privileges, insults labor and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom’s duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labor and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation.”

― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

When we were kids and a few of us woud be kicking a ball a round from one to another, how did we know the rules of this game? How did we learn to regulate our “time with ball” and how many times a person could not have the ball kicked to them? We learned a lot from this but we didn’t know we were learning. We learned to share and we learned what was fair.
Good old days.

KF

Alan

  • Don’t just do something, sit there – Sylvia Boorstein
  • By constructing knowledge, we are also constructing or growing ourselves, a process called individuation (Jung; becoming more ourselves)
  • Pass down wisdom not wounds
  • Self-discipline is self-caring. – M. Scott Peck
  • A disease of prediction and regret
  • anxiety and other mental discomfort arise not from physiological imbalance but from disharmony of the soul
  • Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
  • Expectations are resentments under construction. ― Anne Lamott
  • “If you don’t know how you feel, you don’t know who you are.  If you don’t know who you are, you are probably leading somebody else’s life!” – Maybe Garrett O’Connor
  • “that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection” – Johann Hari
  • Grandiose statements encouraging the other to do what they had intended to do is taking ownership of that choice. These are affectations of martyrdom – KF

“You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.”

David Brooks, The Road to Character

2. Be slow to speak. Be considerate and kind, especially when it comes to deciding on matters under discussion, or about to be discussed in the council.

 3. Be slow to speak, and only after having first listened quietly, so that you may understand the meaning, leanings, and wishes of those who do speak. Thus you will better know when to speak and when to be silent.

6. If the matters being discussed are of such a nature that you cannot or ought not to be silent, then give your opinion with the greatest possible humility and sincerity, and always end with the words salvo meliori iudicio—with due respect for a better opinion.

– Ignatius of Loyola to the Fathers Attending Council of Trent (1546)

Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Design Theory For Our Futures
“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and woman deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” – Freire 

“The illiterate of the 21st century,” Toffler wrote, “will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” ― Alvin Toffler

“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” ― Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

The worst stress for people isn’t having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is, he told me, having to endure “work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.” “Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional. – Johann Hari, Lost Connnections

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger. Being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese. So every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe. Humans need tribes as much as bees need a hive. Our sense of home has shriveled so far and so fast it no longer meets our need for a sense of belonging. So we are homesick even when we are at home.

Johann Hari, Lost Connnections

“A theory is an empirically replicable general hypothesis that surpasses its competitors in reliable verifiability, making it a warranted albeit not absolute conclusion. By contrast, education as a field of study is a deliberative activity for particular situations whose problematic formulations and solutions lead to defensible, though not replicable, decisions that could turn out better or worse than anticipated but from which we can always learn.

How Joe Schwab Thinks

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”

Wright, 2004, p. 124)[paraphrasing Steinbeck]

There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.

The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
  • “[G]ive a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime, but teach an AI to fish and it’ll teach itself biology, chemistry, oceanography, evolutionary theory and then fish all the fish to extinction.” Harris, T. & Raskin, A. (Hosts). (2023, March 24). The AI dilemma [Audio podcast episode]. In Your Undivided Attention. Centre for Humane Technology. https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/the-ai-dilemma
  • Education is the lure of the transcendent—that which we seem is not what we are for we could always be other. Education is the openness to a future that is beyond all futures. Education is the protest against present forms that they may be reformed and transformed (Huebner, 1985g, p. 463).
    • Petra’s essay “Political Activism as Teaching: Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells” – as well as the book in which it appeared (Pedagogies of Resistance)13 – should surely be – along with Hendry’s Engendering Curriculum History – included in any list of required readings for curriculum studies graduate students.14

XX; There are so many versions of me that I don’t even know who the real me is now

Lived Experience vs. Experience https://web.archive.org/web/20181004215521/https://medium.com/@jacobhoerger/lived-experience-vs-experience-2e467b6c2229

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Song of Myself, 51 Walt Whitman – 1819-1892
  • “You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.” August Wilson
  • As Mark Twain said, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”