Mortimer Adler quotes - page 2

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian. (Mortimer Adler)
We love even when our love is not requited. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct. View quote
Mortimer Adler
It is love rather than sexual lust or unbridled sexuality if, in addition to the need or want involved, there is also some impulse to give pleasure to the persons thus loved and not merely to use them for our own selfish pleasure. View quote
Mortimer Adler
In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful. View quote
Mortimer Adler
An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Reading is a basic tool in the living of the good life. View quote
Mortimer Adler
The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God's love and the love of God. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship. (Mortimer Adler)
Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Ultimately, we wish the joy of perfect union with the person we love. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men. View quote
Mortimer Adler
There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. It is when they are in love and reading a love letter. View quote
Mortimer Adler
A report of the Carnegie Foundation recommended the abolition of the undergraduate bachelor of science degree in education leading to the state certification of teachers. Schools of education should become research institutions at the graduate level of the university and not places for the training of schoolteachers. Those planning to enter the profession of teaching should have four years of general, liberal education at the college level, and then three years of practice teaching under supervision... the best teacher is one who learns in the process of teaching. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Above all, money-making and other external indices of social success must become subordinate to the inner attainments of moral and intellectual virtue. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I never write books for my fellow professors to read. I have no interest in the academic audience at all. I'm interested in Joe Doakes. A general audience can read any book I write – and they do. View quote
Mortimer Adler
[Television, radio, and magazines] are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think. View quote
Mortimer Adler
True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline. View quote
Mortimer Adler
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. (Mortimer Adler)
To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent. View quote
Mortimer Adler
It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read. View quote
Mortimer Adler
You can't be a philosopher and an activist. If you do, you get all mixed up. View quote
Mortimer Adler
Montaigne speaks of an "Abecedarian” ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it. The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their A-B-C's, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, "bookful blockheads, ignorantly read.” There have always been literate ignoramuses, who have read too widely, and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all "sophomores.”. View quote
Mortimer Adler