Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The economy, virtually all the new income has gone to the top 10 percent, and we need to find those areas where we can actually make a change in that. And that includes enhancing manufacturing jobs in this country, it includes the ability to go to community college for free, it includes the ability to have debt-free higher education, it includes career technical education in our high schools. It also includes taking on the pharmaceutical companies on the extravagant prices that they`re charging for the drugs. Americans need to stay healthy.
The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." - Walter Karp, Editor Harper's Magazine The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
My upringing did influence me to a certain extent. I grew up going to private school, and we'd have these really cute uniforms, but you'd only have so much sway over how you could "customize" them. I would line my blazers, I would dart my skirts, I'd change the buttons, I would do anything I could to make them unique. And when I started designing, I found myself referencing those roots. I love a sort of preppy, gender-bender vibe. I wanted to incorporate the feel of menswear into the looks. That definitely comes from my private school days.
When you understand that your tax dollars pay for those tear gas canisters that were being fired into the crowd, and when you see that, and to know that a little bit of your fingerprint, your American DNA is a part of that, as well as those stealth bombers and that bomb that's lodged in the side of the school that has "Made in USA" on it in Gaza, and all of the unmanned drones that are blowing up weddings and things of that nature, to know that you pay for that, you really have - you don't have to do it now, but you need to think about that.
Motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson is a prime example of an American company that uses employment conditions to boost productivity. Current CEO James Ziemer - who started with the company while in high school has negotiated imaginative contracts with the unions representing Harley's workers, agreeing to keep production in the U.S. in exchange for constantly reducing total labor costs through automating tasks and changing work rules. Because Harley regularly reassigns workers whose tasks have been automated to other parts of the company.
When I started graduate school we did this publishing class where we learned about submitting and read interviews with editors from different magazines. A lot of them said they got so many submissions that unless the first page stuck out or the first paragraph or even the first sentence they'll probably send it back. So part of my idea was that if I have a really good first sentence maybe they'll read on a bit further. At least half, maybe more of the stories in Knockemstiff started with the first sentence; I got it down then went from there.
Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.
Well, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future.
The most important thing about an astronaut is you have to take for a given a person's done pretty well in school, has the intelligence and all of that to learn new systems and new things. But after that, the most important thing I think is being able to get along with others. Flexibility and teamwork, those issues because as we fly longer and longer in space, those are really important factors, even on short shuttle missions, those are important factors, to put a crew together that can work together effectively as a team, that can get along.
I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?
I think that one of the greatest challenges we have today is around education. One of the things that is dividing us more and more is whether you have good prospects or you don't. Do you live a neighborhood where the schools are good? If you don't, your kids may not read until the time they're in third grade. Do you at least have access to a community college that will give you job training skills so that if you don't go for four years you will at least come out with a decent job and a decent wage. Too many people don't have that opportunity.
If I were the Mexican-American father of a young child who was having trouble sleeping because of Donald Trump, or who was being bullied in school because of Trump, or who was becoming ashamed of her own background because of Trump, and Trump somehow slipped away from his security and was walking down a corridor alone to use the men's room at the restaurant where I worked - if I had that chance to confront him, what would I do? Of course if a Mexican or Latino harmed Trump, it would only make things worse. Let John McCain do it. He's a soldier.
It is true you can be successful without [college], but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have. I would suggest to people to do all that you can. When I dropped out of school, I had worked in the music industry and had checks cut in my name from record labels and had a record deal on the table, and when I wasn’t successful and Columbia said, ’We’ll call you,’ I had to go back and work a telemarketing job, go back to the real world, and that’s how life is. Life is hard. Take advantage of your opportunities.
I don't know if you've been in any inner-city schools, but it's pretty demoralizing. The kids come to class bright-eyed, enthusiastic - entering first grade really looking forward to school. By the fourth grade they're just completely turned off, and by the time they enter high school, they see little relationship between school and employment. It's bad enough you have incompetent teachers and schools that are poorly run, understaffed, and lack material resources. It's even worse when the kids themselves don't feel they have any stake in school.
If America is to compete effectively in world markets, its corporate leaders must strategically position their companies in the right businesses, and then manage their workforces in the right ways. However, the nation has a shortage of business leaders who understand the importance of utilizing human capital to gain competitive advantage, let alone the know-how to do so. In the future, that shortcoming promises to be exacerbated because few business schools today teach aspiring executives how to create the kind of high-involvement organizations.
Discovery is adventure. There is an eagerness, touched at times with tenseness, as man moves ahead into the unknown. Walking the wilderness is indeed like living. The horizon drops away, bringing new sights, sounds, and smells from the earth. When one moves through the forests, his sense of discovery is quickened. Man is back in the environment from which he emerged to build factories, churches, and schools. He is primitive again, matching his wits against the earth and sky. He is free of the restraints of society and free of its safeguards too.
Journalism today is obviously in a major transition. Going to journalism school, learning how to write, working your way up in a little paper in Decatur, Georgia and then moving to Atlanta and then maybe to New York: it's just over. You have to have a whole other set of skills now. You have to be a videographer, you have to do social media. You can't do a long, thoughtful, insightful piece if you don't have the time to do reporting, particularly reporting around somebody who doesn't want to be known or an issue that doesn't want to reveal itself.
Reading is always a way of forming a bond with other people. I'm not very good at socializing - I quite like spending time alone - so reading is a way of engaging quite deeply with the way other people think. Quite often when you meet other people socially you don't get to have a conversation of any depth. You end up talking about how well or how badly someone is doing at school or something of that sort. Questions like, "What we are," "Who we are," "Where are we going," you get those from literature and from people that spend some time thinking.
colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.
I'm not saying to the kids yo drop out of school, education is the most important thing first and foremost. You know, my circumstances were a little different. I needed to work to help out so I couldn't be in school. Not only that, it was getting into trouble and all that s**t. I was getting into trouble more in school than I was out of school, so I had to just go ahead and make that adjustment, so I mean realistically I always tell everybody, in my case I don't got a high school diploma, but I have two Grammys so it kinda worked out best for me.
The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.
There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.
Congress passed the 1887 General Allotment Act. And that act ended up dispossessing tribes of 90 million acres. That history of dispossession was also accompanied by a history of forced assimilation whether it was in residential schools, whether it was in dismantling traditional tribal governance structures. And the justifications for that is that you're not as good as us. Our systems are better. Our modes of education. Our ways of owning land, our ways of working have been continually cited to Indians as the reason for these government policies.
I don't think school reform should be motivated by missionary zeal. I think it should be motivated by evidence of what works. I have been critical of Teach For America in the past but I think one of the things about their model that's interesting is that they're constantly looking at it and whether what they're doing works and reassessing their model, and making changes. So to the extent that I believe everyone in the education sector should be looking at evidence, reassessing, making tweaks to figure out what works, I think it's a positive model.
You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family -- children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses -- you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that.
If you look at Detroit, that mayor, it's been a train wreck for 40 years, the population has gone from 2 million to 700,000. This Mayor comes in, and he talked about streetlights, sanitation, jobs, policing, schools, affordable housing. He's doing it all, and it's growing for the first time in 30 years. Literally, one man. But that one man couldn't do it without business. And business couldn't have done it without a political environment where they wanted to improve things. If you had an antibusiness environment there, it would still be down there.
I feel like I've found my voice in the actor's business. Because when you first get out of school and you're looking for jobs, you don't want to rock the boat - you can't rock the boat. You'll get known for being that sassy girl that, like, has no résumé and no one wants to work with her. But now, I'm "proven," at least in the television world, and hopefully in the theater world. I'm working on the film world. Unfortunately, it takes a while to build that kind of street cred. It's been recently that I even started to have more confidence in myself.
There was a fairly big difference between Detroit and Beverly Hills. I remember this. Detroit actually was a prosperous bustling city when we moved here in 1941. But the first day in Detroit, you always wore a shirt and a tie to school. And I wore a shirt and a tie to Beverly Hills High School, and a girl came up to me and said, "Where are you from?" And I said, "Detroit." And she said, "And you won't be wearing a tie tomorrow, will you?" And I said, "You're absolutely correct." So that was my first adjustment to a slightly more casual environment.
Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.
The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.
We do believe in setting goals. We live by goals. In athletics we always have a goal. When we go to school, we have the goal of graduation and degrees. Our total existence is goal-oriented. We must have goals to make progress, encouraged by keeping records . . . as the swimmer or the jumper or the runner does . . . Progress is easier when it is timed, checked, and measured. . . .Goals are good. Laboring with a distant aim sets the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain.
Schools should be democratic public spheres. They should be places that educate people to be informed, to learn how to govern rather than be governed, to take justice seriously, to spur the radical imagination, to give them the tools that they need to be able to both relate to themselves and others in the wider world. I mean, at the heart of any education that matters, is a central question: How can you imagine a future much different than the present, and a future that basically grounds itself in questions of economic, political and social justice?
Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools." -The Profesor
teenagers are never joking. when seeking to prove a point, principals and teachers should remember that teenagers are never, ever sarcasic or ironic. if they say "I wish someone would drop a bomb on this school right now," that means they have arranged for a nuclear arsenal to be emptied onto the school and should be immediately suspended and ridiculed. if they say they were merely coming up with a joking excuse to postpone a bio test, reply that all jokes are funny, and that since dropping a bomb on a school is not funny, it is therefore not a joke.
[Eric]Goldman [a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law] says back in the 1990s, courts began to confront the question of whether software code is a form of speech. Goldman says the answer to that question came in a case called Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice. Student Daniel Bernstein who created an encryption software called Snuffle. He wanted to put it on the Internet. The government tried to prevent him, using a law meant to stop the export of firearms and munitions. Goldman says the student argued his code was a form of speech.
The primary purpose of the Legislature in establishing "Arbor Day," was to develop and stimulate in the children of the Commonwealth a love and reverence for Nature as revealed in trees and shrubs and flowers. In the language of the statute, "to encourage the planting, protection and preservation of trees and shrubs" was believed to be the most effectual way in which to lead our children to love Nature and reverence Nature's God, and to see the uses to which these natural objects may be put in making our school grounds more healthful and at-tractive.
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist-this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul-a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
Already, new forms of short-term and long-term rental housing are popping up in some metro areas. You can take on a house or apartment for a few months or even a year or two in developments that are striving to provide critical elements of community - schools, healthcare, social and cultural institutions - even for people who are living there only temporarily. People invested in a home, mortgage, or community are less likely to move to more economically vibrant locales. That kind of entrenchment is going to be an impediment to the coming spatial fix.
Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.
This is something that Randi Weingarten said to me when I interviewed her once, which I think I quote in chapter nine. She talks about how only 7 percent of private sector workers in the American economy are in unions. So all the protections that teachers have that are due to collective bargaining - including generous pensions, generous health plans, limits to what they can be asked to do after school and in the summers - all of those things are sources of resentment to the public. And I think that politicians have played off of that quite effectively.
I feel incredibly blessed. I'm happy, but all of this movie business, and working as an actress is really hard. When you're not working is when you have to stay positive and remind yourself that you're talented. What's due for you is due for you, and you don't know when that's going to come. That's something I struggled with after I got out of school, wondering how long I was going to have to wait. Then beautiful jobs started coming to me. Now, I feel that my path is going to be what it's going to be, and as long as I relax and breathe, I can enjoy it.
When I recall my teachers at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! . . . I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages - though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.
My first banjo? My mother's sister, my aunt, lived about a mile from where we did, and she raised some hogs. And she had - her - the hog - the mother - they called the mother a sow - of a hog. And she had some pigs. Well, the pigs were real pretty, and I was going to high school and I was taking agriculture in school. And I sort of got a notion that I'd like to do that, raise some hogs. And so my aunt had this old banjo, and my mother told me, said, which do you want, the pig or a banjo? And each one of them's $5 each. I said, I'll just take the banjo.
What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people. That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense the pride.
Many white-collar workers are lucky enough to have creative-class jobs that are satisfying, which is great as long as you're still able to carve out true, work-free leisure at some point. But there's been a kind of sneaky reframing of work as play as the Silicon Valley model has been imported into other fields. Now you see adult offices that look like nursery schools, and staff paintball parties, work cultures that encourage the "We're a family here!" fantasy while preventing workers from going home at a reasonable hour to be with their actual families.
I was never too interested in high school. I mean, I never went to a dance, I never went out on a date, I never went steady. It became pretty awful for me. Except, of course, I could go see bands, and that was the kick. I used to go to Cleveland just to see any band. So I was in love a lot of the time, but mostly with guys in bands that I had never met. For me, knowing that Brian Jones was out there, and later that Iggy Pop was out there, made it kind of hard for me to get too interested in the guys that were around me. I had, uh, bigger things in mind.
The whole intelectual culture has a filtering system, starts as a child in school. You're expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don't accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you're weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering, which has the, it creates a strong tendency to impose conformism. Now, it's a tendency, so you do have exceptions, and sometimes the exceptions are quite striking.
There's no greater sign of the failure of the American educational system than the extent to which Americans are distracted by the possibility that Earth might end on December 21, 2012. It's a profound absence of awareness of the laws of physics and how nature works. So they're missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower them to understand and to judge when someone else is basically just full of it. Science is like an inoculation against charlatans who would have you believe whatever it is they tell you.
The fact that there could be an ISIS West Bank, the fact that the Palestinian government in Gaza doesn't even acknowledge Israel's right to exist, the fact of constant terror, delegitimization campaigns in the Palestinian schools, these are all much bigger facts. And for the Barack Obama administration to focus on this one fact, almost, not to the expense, but to diminish some of the others which are much more important, is to cast all the blame on Israel and to take the U.N. policy toward Israel, which has been longstanding, and sort of surrender to it.
