Tjhenry

“Religion, like art, is an attempt to deal with the non-rational. That's not irrational. Non-rational. Those powerful forces that inform all of our lives. Love, beauty, the search for meaning, our mortality, grief, alienation, these cannot be empirically measured. It's why Freud said he could never finally write about love. He could write about sex, but he couldn't write about love and religious systems are human creations. God is a human concept. All religious systems are flawed. All of them are finite attempts to deal with the infinite. To deal with those transcendent forces and the need the human beings have for the sacred. And I think art and early religious life, art and religion were not divorced. I think art itself is a religious ritual, certainly an important ritual, and what art and religion are trying to do is acknowledge, preserve, and to a certain extent, explain these forces that make up a complete human being. And I think that is probably one of the great failings of the new atheists and that they don't distinguish between the non-rational and the irrational.”
― Chris Hedges

“What does it mean to be truly educated?

I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls.

To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover.

To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others.

That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley