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.

Ted Sizer on Understanding

“Understanding…[is] the development of powers of discrimination and judgment…. Understanding is more stimulated than learned. It grows from questioning oneself and being questioned by others.”

Theodore Sizer

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Term of Art: Heuristic

heu*ris*tic adj

  1. serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.
  2. encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.
  3. of, pertaining to, or based on experimentation, evaluation, or trial and error methods.
  4. Computers, Math. Pertaining to a trial-and-error method of problem solving method used when an algorithmic method is impractical. –
  5. a heuristic method of argument.
  6. the study of heuristic procedure….

Flexner, Stuart Berg, and Lenore Crary Hauck, eds. Random House Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Random House, 1993.

Book of Answers: George Eliot

 What was George Eliot’s real name? The English author of Middlemarch was born Mary Ann Evans.

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Term of Art: Nationally Normed Assessment

nationally normed assessment: A standardized test that has been administered to a national control group reflecting the demographic profile of the target population (e.g. 4th graders) throughout the country. The scores of all subsequent test takers are then compared with the scores of this control (or norming) group.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

Nietzsche on Protestantism

“Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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

Term of Art: Historical Materialism

“Historical Materialism: A term applied by Karl Marx himself to his theory of society and history. ‘History entailed the analysis of how particular forms of society had come into existence, and the specific historical concepts within which apparently universal or eternal social forms—state, religion, market, and so forth—were located. Materialism denoted the rejection of Hegelian idealism and the primacy of socio-economic processes and relations. A sustained attempt to defend Marx’s account of the determining role in history played by the productive forces is made by William H. Shaw (Marx’s Theory of History, 1978).”

Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Write It Right: But

“But. By many writers this word (in the sense of except) is regarded as a preposition, to be followed by the objective case: ‘All went but him.’ It is not a preposition and may take either the nominative or objective case, to agree with the subject of the object of a verb. ‘All went but he.’ ‘The natives killed all but him.'”

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

Amelia Earhart

Earhart, Amelia: (1897-1937) U.S. aviator, the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Born in Atchison, Kansas, she worked as a military nurse in Canada during World War I and later as a social worker in Boston. In 1928 she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, though as a passenger. In 1932 she accomplished the flight alone, becoming the first woman and the second person to do so. In 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. In 1937, she set out with a navigator, Fred Noonan, to fly around the world; they had completed over two-thirds of the distance when her plane disappeared without a trace in the Pacific Ocean. Speculation about her fate has continued to the present.”

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

Joseph Wood Krutch on New England

“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”

Joseph Wood Krutch

The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar Country “February: The One We Could Do Without” (1949)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Term of Art: Indirect Question

indirect question: 1. A question as reported in indirect speech: e.g. where he was in I asked where he was. 2. An utterance with the force of a question which is not in an interrogative form. Thus, the sentence I would like to know his name has the form of a declarative (1); but it might be uttered as an indirect question, with the same intention, in this respect, as ‘What is his name?’ Compare indirect speech act.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.