Amy

“…I claim that the ancient Irish system possessed pre-eminently two characteristics: first, freedom of the individual, and secondly, an adequate inspiration. Without these two things you cannot have education, no matter how well you may elaborate educational machinery, no matter how you may multiply educational programmes.”
― Patrick Pearse (Padraig Mac an Phiarais)

“Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation—that, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist.”
― Pádraic Pearse, The Murder Machine and Other Essays

“Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson