Quotations Database
Search the Wisdom Archive
Quotations Database
16 years in the making, this 36,000 motivational quote search engine can identify quotations by the name of the author, keyword, gender, general ethnicity, and by phrase. It’s yours to use for free. I think it is the most diverse, deep, and far-reaching quotation search engine on values, ethics, and wisdom anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Enjoy! – Jason
Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men. A man who is emotionally controlled is a person who still has fear, but fears the right things at the right time to the right amount in the right way. And the person who has fear under control is a man who is courageous. All the children, according to [influential education philosopher John Dewey], are destined for leisure, learning, and labor. All have the same three elements in their futures: the demands of work, the duties of citizenship, and the obligation of each individual to make the most of him/herself that his/her capacities allow to lead rich and fulfilling lives. Their treatment in school should be such that it serves these three fundamental purposes for all. The main goal of The Paideia Proposal as an educational manifesto calling for a radical reform of basic schooling in the United States is to overcome the elitism of our school system from its beginning to the present day, and to replace it with a truly democratic system that aims not only to improve the quality of basic schooling in this country, but also aims to make that quality accessible to all our children. It was not until 1916, with the publication of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, that the ideal of a democratic system of public schooling was first broached by a leading educator. In Dewey’s view, all the children in our nascent democratic society have the same destiny and, therefore, should be accorded the same quality of schooling. If the differential capacities of the children are likened to containers of different sizes, then equality of educational treatment succeeds when two results occur. First, each container should be filled to the brim, the half-pint container as well as the gallon container. Second, each container should be filled to the brim with the same quality of substance—cream of the highest attainable quality for all, not skimmed milk for some and cream for others. Not until the second decade of this century was the female half of the population enfranchised. Not until the fifth and sixth decades were the civil rights of blacks secured. In 1910 and 1912 Theodore Roosevelt called for economic reforms to provide the working classes of this country with conditions of life that would enable them to function as good citizens. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Bill of Economic Rights was delivered to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union address. With the advent of democratic institutions so very recent, it is not surprising that we have not yet established a democratic school system in this country. [It is an] error of thinking that the process of education takes place and reaches completion in our educational institutions during the years of basic schooling and in advanced schooling after that. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one has ever been and no one can ever become educated in the early years of life. The reason is simply that youth itself, immaturity, is the insuperable obstacle to becoming educated. Education happens only with continued learning in adult life, after all formal schooling is over. There are two ways in which men possess things: physically and spiritually. We possess them physically when we consume them or use them; we possess them spiritually when we behold them or know them. The Paideia Program seeks to establish a course of study that is general, not specialized; liberal, not vocational; humanistic, not technical. Only in this way can it fulfill the meaning of the words “paideia” and “humanitas,” which signify the general learning that should be in the possession of every human being. Knowledge consists in having the truth and knowing that you have it … What is to be learned falls under three categories: (1) kinds of knowledge to be acquired; (2) skills to be developed; and (3) understanding or insights to be achieved. We are also concerned with why it is to be learned, the reason in each case being the way it serves the three objectives of basic schooling—earning a living, being a good citizen, and living a full life. What is needed to make democracy work as it is not now working — to bring into existence in reality a sound conception of democracy? The mass liberal education of the mass electorate. Not just schooling, but an education that involves moral training as well as training of the mind. To give suffrage and leisure to those who are incapable of liberal education is dangerous to society and dangerous to the individuals themselves who have this leisure and are not educated to use it. The more power science and technology confer upon us, the more dangerous and malevolent that power may become unless its use is checked and guided by moral obligations stemming from our philosophical knowledge of how we ought to conduct our lives and our society. The basic pedagogical precept of the Paideia Program is that all genuine learning arises from the activity of the learner’s own mind. It may be assisted, guided, and stimulated by the activity of teachers. But no activity on the part of teachers can ever be a substitute and become the sole cause of a student’s learning. When the activities performed by the teachers render students passive, the latter cease to be learners—memorizers, perhaps, but not learners. If everything that is to be known by students…could be learned by the reading of written materials, there would be no need for teachers to talk or for students to listen. There would hardly be any need for schools. But not everything to be known can be learned from books, except by most remarkable students, such as those geniuses in history who have been entirely self-taught. Even those rare few would have to be taught how to read better than our young seem to be able to do. The teacher is like the farmer or the physician. The farmer doesn’t produce the grains of the field; he merely helps them grow. The physician does not produce the health of the body; he merely helps the body maintain its health or regain its health. And the teacher does not produce knowledge in the mind; he merely helps the mind discover it for itself. Nothing which can be learned by instruction cannot also be learned by discovery. There’s no question that people change their minds, that the human race in the course of centuries passes from knowledge to error or from error to knowledge in the opinions that it holds. But this is a change in the human mind and not a change in the truth or in what is true. Most of the things that children learn in school are right opinion, not knowledge. All one has to do, I suppose, is to recall how one learns history or geography. These things, being right opinions, can only be learned by a kind of memorization. Compare that with the teaching or learning of geometry, which really can be taught and learned in a rational manner because such truth that is there rests in principles and in the demonstration of conclusions. What this tells us is that when anyone argues from authority, when anyone holds an opinion or holds a position, or says something is true on authority and authority alone, he is holding it as a matter of opinion. And whenever a teacher appeals to his authority to persuade the students to believe something, that teacher isn’t teaching; he’s really only indoctrinating them; he is forming right opinions in their minds. A statement expresses knowledge when our assent to it is involuntary, when our assent to it is compelled or necessitated by the object we are thinking about, as in the case of two plus two equals four. But a statement expresses opinion, not knowledge, when our assent to it is voluntary, when the object leaves us quite free to make up our minds to think this way or that way about the object, to think about the object exactly as we please. Usually, in the case of opinions, what makes up our mind one way or the other is not the thing we are thinking about, but our emotions, our desires, our interests, or some authority upon which we are relying. Thus you can see that the nature of opinion is wishful thinking. It is an exercise of the will to believe. Precisely in proportion as the opinion is not well-founded in fact or evidence, one tends to support it with one’s emotions and to be obstinate in holding onto it as one holds onto a prejudice. Let me start out with the skeptical view and begin by stating the position of a man who in modern times represents the extreme of skepticism. That man is the French essayist, Montaigne. Montaigne says that we know nothing; everything is a matter of opinion. ‘And we mustn’t be fooled,’ he says, ‘by the feelings which we sometimes have of certainty,’ the feeling that the thing is perfectly clear and sure for us. More moderate skepticism is that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. David Hume took the position that we do have some knowledge. Our knowledge consists in sciences like mathematics where we do begin with axioms or self-evident truths and are able to demonstrate conclusions. But Hume says this is all the knowledge we have. In all of history, in all of the experimental sciences we have only, according to Hume, at best, highly probably opinion. There are two views of religious faith. One, held by William James, is that religious faith is an act of the will to believe and this act of the will to believe takes place when we are beyond the evidence or the evidence is insufficient. And so according to James, religious faith is strictly opinion. On the other hand, there is the position of Aquinas, that religious belief or faith is an act of the will. He agrees with James so far. But it is an act of the will wherein the will is itself moved by supernatural gift of grace from God. We have knowledge only where it involves the most universal principles. In respect to all questions below this top level we have, I think, only opinions about what it is good or bad, right or wrong to do in particular cases, for example, whether this particular law is better than that law or whether this way or that way is the way to manifest courage. In my view, the proposition that democracy is the best form of government is a matter of knowledge, not of opinion. …I am quite sure that the latter way, giving authority to the majority decision, is a way that is compatible with human freedom and with the institutions of a free society. Men are free under government when it is government for the people, not for the private or selfish interests of their rulers. Aristotle says it is essential to every form of constitutional state or republic that whatever seems good to the majority of the citizens should have authority. And certainly any democrat would agree to this, for democracy rests on faith in the sound sense of the people as a whole. …We must regard political controversy as good, not bad. In fact, what we ought to fear is uniformity of opinion, not difference of opinion. If instead of considering science, one considers wisdom, man’s wisdom, it is much more questionable whether as one comes down the centuries from ancient to modern times there has been a great advance in human wisdom. One is entitled to doubt that there has been any advance at all over the ages. I personally think that parents, being older, being more mature, having more experience, have a chance of being wiser than their children on immediate practical manners. But they have very little chance of persuading their children of this for the simple reason that the experience on which their wisdom rests is an experience their children do not have. The child has to suffer the same experience, has to live through it, suffer it, before he comes around, if persuaded of the opinion his parents tried to hand on to him. And then often it is too late; often the mistake is made. Of course, the more sides you have in a polygon, a thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand, the more it will approach a circle. But it only approaches the circle and never becomes a circle. A difference in degree is never a difference in kind or vice versa. The Hominidae they define as a genus having one species, that species being defined as Homo sapiens. The only species which is sapient or has enough intelligence to become wise. And that, it seems to me, is the main point. It is the mental difference or the psychological difference that counts. Animals are makers by instinct and humans are makers by art. And in that difference lies the whole difference between man and animals because animals act instinctively and human art represents the influence of human reason. Put a man in a room, lock the doors, close the transom, seal the windows, pour smoke under the door, yell fire, and that man, as soon as panic seizes him, will start to fight his way out of that room by trial and error, claw his way out just as an animal does. But the point is that men think in another way. In the first place, they think about problems that there is absolutely no need for them to solve so far as their biological needs, their struggle for survival, are concerned: the problems of mathematics, the problems of philosophy, the problems of any of the theoretical or speculative sciences. Man is the only animal who devises the constitutions and laws under which he lives. This is the evidence of his reason and freedom. In fact, instead of saying man is the only political animal, what I perhaps should say even more sharply here is that man is the only constitutional animal. …tradition or conservation is an indispensable condition of progress. But there is a second, perhaps even more important condition of progress. And that is that we overcome in all human affairs the inertia of custom. Custom is a great enemy of progress. To say that man is a rational animal is not to say that humans are always reasonable or that they always act rationally. On the contrary, that is too seldom the case. An interesting point is that only man is ever unreasonable. Only man is irrational. Only man goes insane or becomes neurotic. In the case of all other animals, all that they pass on from generation to generation is a biological inheritance, a physical inheritance contained in the germ plasma. But humans, in addition to inheriting biologically from their ancestors, inherit culturally. There is cultural transmission, the transmission from generation to generation of ideas and institutions. …love leads individual humans to do things for other humans. When you love a person, you wish that other person well. You want to benefit or help that other person. You want to do good to that other person. That is a desire; only unlike the selfish desires of things like hunger, this desire or wish of love is a benevolent impulse. Adult learning is endless, and must go on interminably throughout a whole life. One reason for this is that it aims at wisdom. And wisdom is hard to come by; not much of it can be acquired short of a whole lifetime of pursuing it. …the other reason is that to live is to grow. As soon as we stop growing, we begin to die. The commandment is, ‘Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.’ It doesn’t say love. But what does honor mean? As I understand this commandment, it is that children should respect their parents, show them courtesy, consideration, act with goodwill toward them. When I left college I was pretty sure I understood some of the great books I had the good fortune to read there. But I was more fortunate in my teaching career to have to reread some of them many times. I know now that I didn’t understand those books at all when I was in college. In fact, I know now that I didn’t understand them very well even ten years ago. It’s not that I’m any brighter now; I’m just older. One can see these two things, love and desire, as impulses moving in opposite directions, the impulses of love being generous and benevolent, giving to the other; the impulses of desire being selfish and acquisitive, getting something for oneself. …Aristotle’s account of the reasons why men associate with one another. He says that men value three things. They value things for their utility, they value things as pleasant or as sources of pleasure, and they value things for their intrinsic excellence, they value them as they are honorable or admirable.
Note that copyright for motivational quotes, stanzas, lyrics, etc. in many cases is held by those who wrote the words, and permission to copy or reprint those words is not being granted by me. I urge you to look up “fair use of copyrighted material” and make your own decision about how, when, and where to use the words of others. If you feel I have infringed on your copyright by placing one of your inspirational quotes in the database, please contact me and I will quickly give it due consideration.
Today's Quote
Here we are, thousands of years after Socrates, still trying to figure out what happiness has to do with justice.
Blog Posts
View The Full Values Of The Wise Series™
Ancient Wisdom and Progressive Thinking Brought to Life