Themselves

"After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."
--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", Prologue, p. xxii

Sitting

"School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing."
--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", Prologue, p. xx

Manageable

[W]hat shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable."
--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", Prologue, p. xvii

System

[A] considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.
--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", Prologue, p. xv

Depository

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820

Firecracker

"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."
--Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) American Screen Writer, Film Producer, Director

Cannibals

"I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say, meat-eaters in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism."
--Dennis Weaver

Principally

"To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject."
--Albert Einstein

Distrustful

"It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
--James Baldwin

Plumbing II

"Modern cynics and skeptics, see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing."
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) 35th U.S. President (1961-63)

Bone

"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog."
--Jack London

Safeguard II

"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army."
--Edward Everett

Accident

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
32nd American president (1933-45)

Aloof

"Staying aloof is not a solution, it is a cowardly evasion".
--Eleanor Roosevelt, "Tomorrow Is Now"

Dragons

"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
--John Lennon

Fight III

"Fight the rich, not their wars!"
--Anonymous (headline in Freedom, January 2003)

Horrible

"Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
--Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Reform III

"Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before."
--Art Buchwald (1925-2006)
American Humorist and Columnist

Mouse

"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken--unspeakable!--fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse--a little tiny mouse!--of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic."
--Sir Winston Churchill

Frivolous

"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, shouldn't we know better?"
--Peter Cheeke

Loves

"Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money."
--George Carlin

Lioness

"Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to talking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young."
--Sigmund Freud

Instrumentalities

"Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes.  The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.  As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort - as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails."
--Robert Ingersoll, "Crimes Against Criminals"

Facing

 "I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't think you can measure life in terms of years. I think longevity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with happiness. I mean happiness comes from facing challenges and going out on a limb and taking risks. If you're not willing to take a risk for something you really care about, you might as well be dead."
--Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Northern Lights, 1993

Privileges

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
--Dwight D Eisenhower

Champions

"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!"
- Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
Economist and social philosopher

Unobstructed

"Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery."
--Wayne Dyer

Cages II

"If you don't like my opinions leave.But just remember, the animals can't leave the cages that hold them. They are captive and suffering. As you cozy into your bed tonight, try to imagine the pain and the suffering that they endure day after day and night after night. Next time you get some soap in your eyes, try to imagine that pain for 3 or 4 days at a time. Next time you have a stomach ache, try to imagine liquid plumber being poured down your throat till you puke so much blood that you bleed to death. Next time you bump your head, try to imagine being a monkey and getting a steel plate smashed into your skull at 50 miles per hour. Then, only then should you feel compelled to tell me that I'm wrong about my opinions. For all these things have happened in the name of science. They continue in abundance till this day."
--Ricki Rockett

Administering

"Arguing with people who have lost all sense of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
--Thomas Paine

Hushed

"The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny."
--William Ellery Channing