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.

Mural

“Mural: A large painting or decoration applied directly on a wall surface or completed separately and later affixed to it. Early Italian Renaissance examples include church frescoes, while in this century Expressionist and Social Realist murals have been commissioned for public buildings in postrevolutionary Mexico.”

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

Discursive

“Discursive (adjective): Covering a range of topics or discoursing freely and broadly, moving from subject to subject; characterized by rational analysis rather than intuition. Adverb: discursively; noun: discursiveness.

‘He published some of the best reporting—of an unofficial and personal kind—that was written about the war, and he elicited from Augustus John his delightful discursive memoirs, in which history is unimportant and chronology does not exist.’ Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials”

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

The Doubter’s Companion: Bees

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.

Write It Right: Depot for Station

“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.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

“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

Term of Art: Self-Correction

“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.

Fred Allen on the Decline of Discourse

“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.

Diatribe

“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.

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

“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, AlfieWhat Does It Mean to be Well Educated? Boston: Beacon Press, 2007

Mosan

“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.