Quotes by Social Critics - Page 16

Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessment—which would yield a monstrous toll if accurately conducted on a global scale—might perhaps be a proper task in the United States. At the same level of integrity, disciplined Soviet intellectuals are horrified over real or alleged American crimes, but perceive their own only as benevolent intent gone awry, or errors of an earlier day, now overcome; the comparison is inexact and unfair, since Soviet intellectuals can plead fear as an excuse for their services to state violence.
Noam Chomsky
Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.
James Howard Kunstler
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.
Noam Chomsky
One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.
Noam Chomsky
In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.
Noam Chomsky
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.
Noam Chomsky
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is that 40 percent of the US population does not see why it is a problem, since Christ is returning in a few decades. About the same percentage believe that the world was created a few thousand years ago. If science conflicts with the Bible, so much the worse for science. It would be hard to find an analogue in other societies.
Noam Chomsky
In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.
Noam Chomsky
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.
Noam Chomsky
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.
Lenny Bruce
12% of people marry because they are completely in love. 88% of people marry just so they are then liable for only half of their rent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.
Cornel West
When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is a correlation between the number of days since a man last had sex, and, the number of things that he is willing to do for a woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.
Cornel West
We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.
Noam Chomsky
If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.
Noam Chomsky
When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One of the most common and most dangerous misbeliefs is that it is impossible for someone to be stupid just because they are a doctor or a lawyer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on.
Noam Chomsky
The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues.
Paul Goodman
Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably, since the young grow up on the old, towards their activities, and into (or against) their institutions; and the old foster, teach, train, exploit and abuse the young. Even neglect of the young, except physical neglect, has an educational effect -- not the worst possible.
Paul Goodman
The other day I happened to be reading a careful, interesting account of the state of British higher education. The government is a kind of market-oriented government and they came out with an official paper, a ‘White Paper’ saying that it is not the responsibility of the state to support any institution that can’t survive in the market. So, if Oxford is teaching philosophy, the arts, Greek history, medieval history, and so on, and they can’t sell it on the market, why should they be supported? Because life consists only of what you can sell in the market and get back, nothing else. That is a real pathology.
Noam Chomsky
Assuming that all ‘unschooled’ people to lack education is akin to assuming that a salary is the only means to make money, or, that a vagina or a penis is the only source of an orgasm.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Freedom of speech is unnecessary if the people to whom it is granted do not think for themselves.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand.
Noam Chomsky
Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
Noam Chomsky
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
Noam Chomsky
You know you made it, when your friends tell their friends that you are their friend.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know you made it, when people you know, tell people they know, that you know them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The more you know, the less you talk. The less you talk, the more you know.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Knowing more than someone does not necessarily mean that you know every single thing they know.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It sometimes requires ignorance and arrogance to know something for sure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An ignorant man who is regarded as knowledgeable by people who are more ignorant than him is still ignorant.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are generally treated based on how much or little we have, earn, or know—or seem to have, earn, or know.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is no problem with the wider culture that you cannot see in the spades in the Christian Church. The rot is in us, and not simple out there. And Christians are making a great mistake by turning everything into culture wars. It's a much deeper crisis.
Os Guinness
Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.
Noam Chomsky
To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.
Cornel West
I'm sorry if any of you are catholic. I'm not sorry if you're offended, I'm actually just sorry by the fact that you're catholic
Bill Hicks
To come to faith on the basis of experience alone is unwise, though not so foolish as to reject faith altogether because of lack of experience ... the quality of a Christian's experience depends on the quality of his faith, just as the quality of his faith depends in turn on the quality of his understanding of God's truth.
Os Guinness
What has happened to create this doubt is that a problem (such as a deep conflict or a bad experience) has been allowed to usurp God's place and become the controlling principle of life. Instead of viewing the problem from the vantage point of faith, the doubter views faith from the vantage point of the problem. Instead of faith sizing up the problem, the situation ends with the problem scaling down faith. The world of faith is upside down, and in the topsy-turvy reality of doubt, a problem has become god and God has become a problem.
Os Guinness
The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.
Os Guinness
Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical.
Os Guinness
We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most adults are knowledgeable to a child, but ignorant for their age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most women would each be left with fewer dreams or without a dream, if the institution of marriage were to be abolished.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When it comes to their love lives, some people do not really have high standards; they merely have low sex drive.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most of the very few people who would choose a good heart over riches would eventually use that to either make a lot of money, or attract men or women who are rich.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people would instantly start feeling ten years older if someone were to convince them that they were actually born a decade before their birthdate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana