Knife

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."
--Malcolm X
TV interview after 90-day moratorium (March 1964)

Allegiance

"When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?"
--Mark Twain

Darkness

"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end--because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass."
--J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Livestock

"Nationalism is pimped-out bigotry, designed to provoke a Stockholm Syndrome in the livestock."
--Stefan Molyneux

Convincing

"After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim."
--Alison Miller, "Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse"

Born III

"We are born free, but are taught to obey orders."
--Marty Rubin

Clouds

"Even when lightning flashes inside them [clouds], we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, next pain, next breath, the next page. This is how we go on."
--Sidney Sheldon, "Windmills of the Gods"

Changing

"Changing is what people do when they have no options left."
--Holly Black, "Red Glove"

Constellations

"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."
--Alan W. Watts

Consumer

"The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for."
--Bill Bonner, Editor of The Daily Reckoning, April 3, 2003

Thousand III

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."
--George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (Jojen Reed)

Defined II

"We are defined by how we use our power."
--Gerry Spence, "The Rat Hole" (Essay on the use and abuse of power.12-25-03)

Manpower

"Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up."
--Frank Zappa

Coup d’école

"The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideology directly into the plastic, unformed minds of children--by means of seizing a country’s educational system and turning it into a vehicle for indoctrination. In this way one may capture an entire generation without intellectual resistance, in a single coup d’école."
--Leonard Peikoff, "Ominous Parallels"

Coercive

"Schooling that children are forced to endure--in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the 'learning' is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests--turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels."
--Peter Gray

Merges

"Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority."
--Stanley Milgram

Prep

"The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all."
--C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man"

Inculcated

"When you grow up in middle America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief - no, the understanding - that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on Earth. Countries just don't come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious. I used to feel this way myself."
--Bill Bryson

Aim IV

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
--H.L. Mencken

Point II

"Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?"
--Peter Hitchens

Phenomenon

"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor."
--John Taylor Gatto, "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"

Dulled

"What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities."
--R. Buckminster Fuller

Daring

"Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Relaxation

"Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another."
--Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard 

Muck-Stick

"I've always been amused by the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I've never known a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it."
--John Steinbeck, "America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction"

Plongeur

"A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him."
--George Orwell, "Down and Out in Paris and London"

Division

"Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, chapter 18 (1835).

Proportion

In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread"; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour. And inasmuch [as] most good things are produced by labour, it follows that [all] such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
--Abraham Lincoln,
fragments of a tariff discussion (c. December 1, 1847); in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), vol. 1, p. 407-8.

Superstition

"The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase."
--William F. Buckley, Jr.
National Review, January 16, 1962

Madmen

"It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future."
--Thomas Sankara:
Burkinabé military captain, Marxist revolutionary, pan-Africanist theorist, and President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987