Category Archives: Reference

These are materials for teachers and parents, and you’ll find, in this category, teachers copies and answer keys for worksheets, quotes related to domain-specific knowledge in English Language Arts and social studies, and quotes on issues of professional concern. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

William James on Cognition

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

William James

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

Rotten Reviews: Journey to The End of The Night

“Most readers will find Journey to The End of  The Night a revolting book; its vision of human life will seem to them a hideous nightmare. It does not carry within itself adequate compensation for the bruising and battering of the spirit with which one reads it: there is no purgative effect from all these disgusts. If this is life, then it is better not to live.”

J.D. Adams, New York Times Book Review

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

Cicero’s Advice for Modern Legislators

“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.

Rotten Reviews: The Fall by Albert Camus

“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.

Bertrand Russell on Patriotism

“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.

Rotten Reviews: Lord Byron

“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 AdamsMemoirs 1830

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

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

“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.

Rotten Review: Of Mice and Men

“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.

Rotten Reviews: The Jungle

“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.

Clarence Darrow on History

“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.