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.

Rotten Reviews: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Posted on December 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest, he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.”

New Statesman

“…it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr. Eliot’s gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment.”

Times Literary Supplement

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

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Wise Words from Aldous Huxley in a Political Season

Posted on December 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Idealism is the noble toga that that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

Aldous Huxley

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

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Will Durant on Why Teaching Will Never Become Boring

Posted on December 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

Will Durant (1885-1981)

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

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Rotten Reviews: Emily Dickinson

Posted on December 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

“An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England Village–or anywhere else–cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravity and grammar…. Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly, 1892

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

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Ambrose Bierce, Presciently, on School Privatization

Posted on December 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Corporation n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”

Ambrose Bierce

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

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Rotten Reviews: On Charles Dickens

Posted on November 29, 2016 | Leave a comment

“We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation…. Fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in The Dunciad, and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day.”

Saturday Review, 1858

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

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Derek Bok on Paying a Price

Posted on November 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Derek Bok, Universities and the Future of America (1990)

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

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Rotten Reviews: Alice in Wonderland

Posted on November 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

“We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled that enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.”

Children’s Books

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

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Georges Clemenceau on the Rise and Fall of American Civilization

Posted on November 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”

Georges Clemenceau

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

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An Epigram for Our Time From Jean Piaget

Posted on November 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

“The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.”

Jean Piaget (1896-1680)

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

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Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference

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