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.

Charles Ives on Awards

Posted on April 12, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.”

Charles Ives

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

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G.K. Chesterton on Journalism

Posted on April 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Journalism consists largely in saying ‘Lord Jones died’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”

G.K. Chesterton

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Poverty and Cognition Redux

Posted on April 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

“But we cannot fully choose when our minds will be riveted. We think about that impending project not only when we sit down to work on it, but also when we are at home trying to help our child with her homework. The same automatic capture that helps us focus becomes a burden in the rest of life. Because we are preoccupied by scarcity, because our minds constantly return to it, we have less mind to give to the rest of life. This is more than a metaphor. We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth. We can measure fluid intelligence, a key resource that affects how we process information and make decisions. We can measure executive control, a key resource that affects how impulsively we behave. And we find the scarcity reduces all these components of bandwidth—it makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled. And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not the that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces one’s bandwidth.”

Excerpted from: Mullainathan, Sendhil and Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. New York: Picador, 2013.

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Some Prescient Words from 1930 on Educational and Curricular Fads

Posted on April 5, 2024 | Leave a comment

“In a 1930 symposium on ‘The New Education, Ten Years After,’ in The New Republic, Boyd H. Bode of Ohio State University remarked querulously that ‘To the casual observer, American education is a confusing and not altogether edifying spectacle. It is productive of endless fads and panaceas; it is pretentiously scientific and at the same time pathetically conventional; it is scornful of the past, yet painfully inarticulate when it speaks of the future.'”

Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

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Grace Abbot

Posted on March 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Grace Abbot: (1878-1939) U.S. social worker, public administrator, educator, and reformer. Born in Grand Island, Nebraska, she did graduate work at the University of Chicago and began working at Jane Addams’ Hull House in 1908. That same year she cofounded the Immigrant’s Protective League in Chicago. As director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau 1921-1934, she fought to end child labor through legislation and federal contract policies, and proposed a constitutional amendment prohibiting child labor. Her best-known book is book is The Child and the State (2 volumes, 1938).”

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

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Fran Lebowitz on Sleep

Posted on March 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Sleep is death without the responsibility.”

Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life “Why I Love Sleep” (1978)

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

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Women’s Liberation Movement

Posted on March 29, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Women’s liberation movement: Revival of feminism in the 1960s by U.S. women. A coalition of American women’s groups, including the National Organization of Women, sought to overturn laws that enforced discrimination in matters such as contract and property rights and employment and pay. The movement also sought to broaden women’s self-awareness and challenge traditional stereotypes of women as passive, dependent, and irrational. An effort in the 1970s to pass the Equal Rights Amendment failed, but its aims had been largely achieved by other means by the end of the century.”

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

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Mary Wollstonecraft

Posted on March 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Mary Wollstonecraft: (1759-1797) English writer. She taught school and worked as a governess and for a London publisher. In 1797 she married William Godwin; she died days after the birth of their daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, that same year, at the age of 38. She is noted as a passionate advocate of educational and social equality for women. Her early Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) foreshadowed her mature work on the place of women in society. A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), whose core is a plea for equality of education between men and women. The Vindication is widely regarded as the founding document of modern feminism.”

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

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Margaret Mead on Sex and Gender

Posted on March 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex…. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”

Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies conclusion (1935)

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

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Christa Wolf

Posted on March 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Christa Wolf: (1929-2011) German novelist and essayist. Wolf’s major theme is the individual damaged and crippled by society. Der geteilte Himmel (1963; tr Divided Heaven, 1983), a critical account of East German society, established her as a major writer. Her highly acclaimed novel Nachdenken uber Christa T. (1968; tr The Quest for Christa T, 1970), both a requiem for a dead friend and an analysis of the limits of individual development set by society, caused a debate about new modes of narration in East German literature. The novel Kindheitesmuster (1976; tr Patterns of Childhood, 1984) is an attempt to come to terms with the National Socialist past. In Kein Ort Nurgens (1979; tr No Place on Earth, 1982), Wolf Depicts a fictional meeting between Kleist and Karoline von Gunderrode, two alienated individuals, both poets and both suicides, who longed for a different society. With this and other works, Wolf contributed to a reevaluation of Romanticism in the German Democratic Republic. Reverting to mythological sources in Kassandra (1983; tr 1984), Wolf finds in the story of Cassandra a foreshadowing of what was to become reality for subsequent centuries: the exclusion of women as subjects of history. Written in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Storfall, Nachrichten eines Tages (1987; tr Accident. A Day’s News, 1989) deals with Western civilization’s potential for destruction. Wolf’s short story, Was bleibt (1990; tr What Remains and Other Stories, 1993) led to a controversy about the status of literature by former East German authors. Selections in English of Wolf’s other writings include The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (1977), and The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays (1993).”

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

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