Richard Mitchell > Quotes

“Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.”
― Richard Mitchell

“People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. ”
― Richard Mitchell

“Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and "reading material." The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you don't do the other simply because you do the one.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Leaning Tower of Babel and Other Affronts by the Underground Grammarian

“It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds....In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.”
― Richard Mitchell

“His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
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― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Training is a good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend, and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

“And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.”
― Richard Mitchell

“Always let your conscience be your guide" is advice of doubtful value. Conscience must be, among other things, a list of sayings, an anthology of quotations and precepts. Where did they come from, and who first wrote them on my empty slate, and why?”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely--provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your own mind.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“The first and most obvious understanding of education comes from the fact that anyone who can not tell Reason from rubbish is not yet in a condition to know that he can not tell Reason from rubbish, a disability, which, you would suppose, can hardly be one of those put forth as education. But it is.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Which will be detected by an intelligence test: the ability to make some rationally demonstrable conclusion as to whether suffering injustice is better than inflicting, or the ability to tell where the trains will meet? Is it possible that we might meet some person who does indeed give himself to consider whether patience is a fixed or a changeable attribute, but can not for the life of him tell you which diagram was made from which? And one more question: How did the makers of the intelligence test come to "know" what intelligence is, that they can devise ways to measure it, and then pronounce its worth in numbers?”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“What should we mean by intelligence? It is not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There is a "shouldness" in it.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If such as Thomas a Kempis and Bernard of Clairvaux are generous providers of the occasion of education, rather than reciters of precepts and beliefs, it is because they are seeking to be virtuous and to compose their own lives, rather than worrying that others might be vicious, leading discordant lives. Such teachers do the best that a teacher can do. In their own deliberations, they cast enough light that I may see something by it, if I happen to be looking.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If it is education that is brought about in the would-be-stone-throwers, and that might be brought about in us even by just the right little thing, education must have some attributes that we don't ordinarily grant it. For one thing, it is not a "rank," like citizenship or captaincy. It is an inward event, like joy or surprise. It would seem more correct to say, education has sometimes happened to me, than, I am educated. That would also reflect the fact that education is usually temporary, and who is brought to it just now, and in this context, may fall out of it tomorrow, or forget all about it when his belly growls. Thus it can be, for instance, that a highly trained and skillful expert can also be foolish, and utterly uneducated.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“I have made and accepted my own version of the natural order of things, and actually supposed a universe that has, or damn well ought to have, my convenience in mind.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any cave painter suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“When I fume in the tollbooth line, I am not a good person to whom a bad thing is happening. I am a liar who is getting what he deserves.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“The makers of our Constitution were not a congregation of religious enthusiasts. If they protected religion from the intrusive propensities of all government and its functionaries, it was not because they loved churches and doctrines. It was because they loved freedom, and hated tyranny, especially tyranny over the mind. They knew that religion cannot exist except in a mind. The First Amendment protects not churches, but individuals, minds. It affirms that the inner life of individuals is none of government’s damned business.”
― Richard Mitchell

“If we think only the thoughts that are customary to us, and listen only to the words of those who are "of our mind," we are little likely to find refreshment and renewal in our minds, and thus all too likely to suppose that we have come to the end of all deliberations that we have to make.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“They might also ask us by what reasoning we have concluded that we can have it both ways, that in one breath we can say that those remote and lofty thinkers have not answered our questions as to the good, and, in another, we can boast that "we" have indeed become a "better" species, having virtuously given up such nasty habits as slavery and dueling and cannibalism.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“Child-rearing is not some special part of life, set aside for some temporary purpose and put aside at a certain age. It is the principal business of life, the search for the condition that is naturally promised for us by the fact of our life. And we must do it by ourselves, one by one.”
― Richard Mitchell

“Tyranny is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various. The well and truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they will say and think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt and violent or covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population in which the power of the word is dulled and, thus, the power of thought occluded and the power of deed brought low.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Leaning Tower of Babel and Other Affronts by the Underground Grammarian