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.

Cicero’s Advice for Modern Legislators

Posted on July 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“What better or greater gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Rotten Reviews: The Fall by Albert Camus

Posted on July 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“The style is unattractive if apt, being the oblique and stilted flow of a man working his way around to asking for a loan. There is a good deal of jaded Bohemian rot about the bourgeoisie being worse than professional criminals (are we not all guilty, etc.) and outbursts of cynical anguish about platitudes. e.g. ‘don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them.’ One might define stupidity as the state of needing to be told this.”

Anthony Quinton, New Statesman

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Bertrand Russell on Patriotism

Posted on July 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”

Bertrand Russell

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

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Rotten Reviews: Lord Byron

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“His versification is so destitute of sustained harmony, many of his thoughts are so strained, his sentiments so unamiable, his misanthropy so gloomy, his libertinism so shameless, his merriment such a grinning of a ghastly smile, that I have always believed his verses would soon rank with forgotten things.”

John Quincy Adams, Memoirs 1830

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Henry Peter Brougham on the Case for Free, Independent, Secular, and Public Education in One Sentence

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”

Henry Peter Brougham in a Speech to the House of Commons (1828)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Rotten Review: Of Mice and Men

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, Of Mice and Men will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists…. Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Christian Andersen.”

Time

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: The Jungle

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naive, his statement of facts so biased, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust many honest, sensible folk with the very terms he uses so glibly.”

The Bookman

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Clarence Darrow on History

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“History repeats itself; that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”

Clarence Darrow

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

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Rotten Reviews: Babbitt

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

“As a humorist, Mr. Lewis makes valiant attempts to be funny; he merely succeeds in being silly. In fact, it is as yellow a novel as novel can be.”

Boston Evening Transcript

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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James Baldwin on Education as a Consciousness Raising Process

Posted on July 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

(Aside: Have you seen I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about James Baldwin’s abandoned book, Remember This House? It’s a fine film, richly deserving of all the fulsome praise it has garnered. I highly recommend it.)

“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

James Baldwin “The Negro Child—His Self Image” in The Saturday Review (1963)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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