Category Archives: Quotes

As every second post on this site is a quote. You’ll find a deep and broad variety of quotes under this category, which overlap with several other tags and categories. Many of the quotes are larded with links for deeper reading on the subject of the quote, or connections between the subject of the quotes and other people, things, or ideas. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

The Doubter’s Companion: Bees

Posted on July 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

Bees: In his Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire points out that bees seem superior to humans because one of their secretions is useful. Nothing a human secretes is of use; quite the contrary. Whatever we produce makes us disagreeable to be around.

The bee’s social organization also invites comparisons. If the queen were to be removed and the drones were able to convince the worker bees to go on working while they stepped in as managers, what would happen to our supply of honey?

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes

Tagged , ,

Write It Right: Depot for Station

Posted on June 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Depot for Station. ‘Railroad depot.’ A depot is a place of deposit; as, a depot of supply for an army.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , , ,

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Posted on June 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: (April 19-May 16, 1943) Revolt by Polish Jews under Nazi occupation against deportation to Treblinka. By July 1942 the Nazis had herded 500,000 Jews from surrounding areas into the ghetto in Warsaw. Though starvation killed thousands each month, the Nazis began transferring over 5,000 Jews a week to rural ‘labor camps.’ When word reached the ghetto in early 1943 that the destination was actually the gas chambers at Treblinka, the underground Jewish combat group ZOB attacked the Nazis, killing 50 in four days of street fighting and causing the deportations to halt. On April 19, Heinrich Himmler sent 2,000 SS men and army troops to clear the ghetto of its remaining 56,000 Jews. For four weeks the Jewish ZOB and guerillas fought with pistols and homemade bombs, destroying tanks and killing several hundred Nazis, until their ammunition ran out. All the Jews were either killed or deported, and on May 16 the SS chief declared ‘The Warsaw Ghetto is no more.’”

Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged ,

Term of Art: Self-Correction

Posted on June 27, 2025 | Leave a comment

“self-correction: A student’s ability to detect and correct errors. The term is often used while students read aloud and hear themselves make errors but correct it. Some reading tests consider a self-correction to be an error, which can result in a misleading oral reading score.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference

Tagged ,

Fred Allen on the Decline of Discourse

Posted on June 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

“During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.”

Fred Allen

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes

Tagged ,

Diatribe

Posted on June 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Diatribe (noun): And abusive, often prolonged attack or denunciation; acrimonious harangue or critique.

‘Without polemic, dialectic, or diatribe, she has conveyed more clearly than anyone I’ve ever read before what it was like to be a girl in the 50’s, when one had a chance to grow up quietly and gradually.’ Susan Bolotin, The New York Times”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference

Tagged , ,

Linda Darling-Hammond on Middle and High Schools in the United States

Posted on June 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Many well-known adolescent difficulties are not intrinsic to the teenage years but are related to the mismatch between adolescents’ developmental needs and the kinds of experiences most junior high and high schools provide. When students need close affiliation, they experience large depersonalized schools; when they need to develop autonomy, they experience few opportunities for choice and punitive approaches to discipline; when they need expansive cognitive challenges and opportunities to demonstrate their competence, they experience work focused largely on the memorization of facts…”.

Linda Darling-Hammond

Excerpted from: Kohn, Alfie. What Does It Mean to be Well Educated? Boston: Beacon Press, 2007

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes

Tagged ,

Mosan

Posted on June 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Mosan: Term referring to art produced in the 12th and early 13th centuries in the valley of the Meuse River, which rises in northeastern France and flows through the Low Countries.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference

Tagged

Liberal Arts

Posted on June 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Liberal Arts: In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Biblical authority for fixing the number at seven comes from Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” Such applied subjects as law and medicine were excluded from the from the liberal arts on the grounds that they were concerned with purely practical matters. In modern times, the liberal arts include languages, sciences, philosophy, history, and related subjects. The term is a translation of the Latin artes liberales, so called because their pursuit was the privilege of freemen who were called liberi.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Leave a comment

Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

Tagged , ,

Some Hopeful Thinking from Mark Edmundson

Posted on June 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet and feel what they have to offer–words, mere words–must look shabby by comparison.

Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium is words. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who we are and what we are. Then we can step back and gain distance on what we’ve said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day’s end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then they can brood on what they’ve said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the possibility of new beginnings. In this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don’t permit.”

Excerpted from: Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference

Tagged , ,