Bela L.M > Bela's Quotes

“وقال ابنُ عطَاء: الرِّضا سكونُ القلبِ إلى قَديمِ اختيارِ اللهِ للعبدِ .. أنَّهُ اختارَ لهُ الأفضل، فيرضى به ..”
― ابن قيم الجوزية, مدارج السالكين بين منازل إياك نعبد وإياك نستعين

“This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree

“Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.

In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.

Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.

This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.

The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.”
― Christopher Langan

“The world needs the kind of education by means of which character is formed, strength of the mind is increased and the human intellect is expanded beyond its own limits.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree

“Unfortunately for the university, none of that information could make the slightest place for itself inside the circuits of my brain. I was looking for education, but all I found was heartless indoctrination. And indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost

“Leonard Schapiro, writing on Stalinism, warned us that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“No mourners. No funerals. Among them, it passed for 'good luck.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“It's not natural for women to fight."
"It's not natural for someone to be as stupid as he is tall, and yet there you stand.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“In character, in manner, in style, in all the things, the supreme excellence is simplicity”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Favorite Poems

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen

“Be true to yourself. But that's something everyone says and no one means. No one wants you to be yourself. They want you to be the version of yourself that they like.”
― Marie Lu, The Young Elites

“True.  It’s my own fault, I suppose. I shouldn’t have married a man who is prettier than I am.”
― K.M. Shea, Beauty and the Beast

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I will call you Beauty, for that is what you are.”
― Meagan Spooner, Hunted

“Dreams are hard," he said. "You work toward them, struggle and sacrifice, but that doesn't always mean you will get there. I used to believe if I wanted something badly enough, I was destined to win it as long as I never gave up trying.”
― Elizabeth Camden, With Every Breath

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.”
― William Hazlitt, On The Pleasure of Hating

“The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.”
― William Hazlitt, Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims

“Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.”
― William Hazlitt

“He said the proclivities for indulging in gossip stems from the same impulse as the reading of novels, only gossip touches on real people. Therein lies the harm.”
― Sherwood Smith, Danse de la Folie

“Except. What is normal at any given time? We change just as the seasons change, and each spring brings new growth. So nothing is ever quite the same.”
― Sherwood Smith, Crown Duel

“There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is as they please or displease us.”
― William Hazlitt

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."

(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953)”
― Albert Einstein

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”
― Ronald E. Osborn

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”
― Baruch De Spinoza, Ethics

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
― Gertrude Stein

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Including Essays, First & Second Series, English Traits, Nature & Considerations by the Way

“Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
― W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk