Instructive Quotes - page 3
Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves.
Sigmund Freud
We often hear that mothers do the caring; fathers just do the playing. This is a false dichotomy -- even a dangerous one -- because fathers' particular style of play involves both a conscious focus on teaching and, as the research is now showing, is instructive to children even when it is not consciously designed to be so.
Warren Farrell
It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived - especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars - not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.
John Updike
[B]eing on the wrong side of history also served him a heaping plate of material for new work after 1945 when, in a trilogy of novels-D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle, 1957), Nord (North, 1960), Rigodon (1961)-he chronicled a shattered world in ever more fragmented prose and honed his persecution complex via his increasingly deranged narrator. The writer who said he was only about style was in fact a revisionist historian, providing a rare and perversely instructive view of Vichy from the point of view of the defeated. His postwar novels are much more overtly political than the first two. They're also ventures into Holocaust denial: "Nuremberg," he wrote in D'un château l'autre, "needs redoing."
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In the fifteen years following the First World War, and especially in the immediate aftermath, the industrial nations exploited this new freedom in remarkably diverse fashion. The French followed the line of least resistance with, on the whole, the best results. The British followed the line of greatest wounds. The Germans so handled matters, or so yielded to circumstances, as to produce the greatest inflation of modern times. The United States, by a combination of mismanagement and non-management, produced the greatest depression. In all the long history of money, the decade of the 1920s-extended by a few years to the consequences-is perhaps the most instructive.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I recall a conversation with a scientist who so insistently wanted to be the defender of modern science that he even attempted to diminish the significance of all ancient accumulations. Whereas, precisely, each young representative of modern science must first be open to everything useful and more so to all that bears the testimony of ages. All negation is contrary to creativeness. In his enlightened, constantly progressive movement, a true creator, first of all, is not negative. A creator has no time for condemnation and negation. The process of creativeness proceeds in an unrestrained progression. Therefore it is painful to see how a man, because of certain prejudices and superstitions, entangles himself with phantoms. In order that no one might suspect a scientist of being old-fashioned, in his fear he is ready to inflict anathema and oblivion upon the most instructive accumulations of the experiences of antiquity. Ch. 1 Fearlessness.
Nicholas Roerich
I don't think that we are a species or a people that can exist without making mistakes somewhere along the line. Some make mistakes that are greater than others. But I do believe that we should have the courage and the ability to look at something that we did, even if in the first instance we believed it, when in the wake of the aftermath and the truth, you find out that that was not the case, to then say, 'Let me go back and examine what led me to this conclusion. What gods was I serving? What masters was I serving? What was it all about?' and then try to be more instructive to people who will listen to you.
Harry Belafonte
He pleads further for the attention of the philosophers to the productions of their humbler countrymen, by reminding them that many of the phenomena of trades are not only parts of the history of Nature, but some of them may be reckoned among its more noble and useful parts, for they show us Nature in motion,-the most instructive condition in which we can behold her."
Robert Boyle
The Nixon/Obama parallels are instructive. Richard Nixon was, and Barack Obama is, a loner with many admirers and few friends. Both preferred to speak to the electorate in heavily scripted settings. Both were lawyers. Both were also charged - nearly every week - with violating the Constitution. Both tolerated substantial cuts in U.S. military spending while inflating social-welfare and environmental obligations. And both did whatever they had to do to appeal to a consistent enemy of the United States and its key allies.
Richard Nixon
