My Commonplace
These are some of the latest quotes I’ve been jotting down. If you aren’t familiar with what a Commonplace book is, you can read about it here.
Our country is full of people who know things, and of children who want to learn things. A successful education system is one that brings the two together, so that knowledge can pass between them. In every village there are people with knowledge that would be useful to the young – retired accountants and lawyers, musicians and singers, those who speak a foreign language, writers, plumbers, farmers, engineers and amateur historians. And many of those would welcome the opportunity to teach what they know. Somehow we have failed to harness this capital, letting it go to waste while our children drift in search of it. Gradually our governments have begun to wake up to this fact. We are seeing a revival in government circles of the old idea of education as a charitable gift from one generation to the next, rather than a form of state-controlled social engineering.Roger Scruton
A Point of View, The Case for not leaving education to the teachers.
A Point of View, The Case for not leaving education to the teachers.
My own family, good book, a roaring fire, and a simple meal on the porch, now that is my idea of a bully social event.Theodore Roosevelt
My investigation of whether God had truly blessed India through the Bible yielded incredible discoveries: the university where I was studying, the municipality and democracy I lived in, the High Court behind my house and the legal system it represented, the modern Hindi that I spoke as my mother tongue, the secular newspaper for which I had begun to write, the army cantonment west of the road I lived on, the botanical garden to the east, the public library near our garden, the railway lines that intersected in my city, the medical system I depended on, the Agricultural Institute across town–all of these came to my city because some people took the Bible seriously.Vishal Mangalwadi
The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization
The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or a fact about the world that you have learned, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.Mortimer J. Adler
How to Read a Book
How to Read a Book