More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”
but if this nation ultimately fails, I believe it will be because opinions, propaganda, and superstitions replaced facts as the basis for our governance.
It’s about allowing facts to win out over prejudice, no matter how deeply entrenched.
Isaac Asimov wrote, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that
‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
By reading books, we can continually challenge our own biases and learn beyond our level of formal education.
In his masterful 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass opened many people’s eyes to the horrors of slavery.
a democracy requires open access to ideas. It requires a willingness to struggle and learn, to question our own suppositions and biases, to open ourselves as citizens, and a nation, to a world of books and thought.
If we become a country of superficiality
and easy answers based on assumptions and not one steeped in reason and critical learning, we will have lost the foundation of our founding and all that has allowed our...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
This scorn of knowledge (especially when the conclusions are painful) in exchange for fact-free rhetoric is not entirely new in our history, but it has always been the language of demagoguery and it is a betrayal of our traditions.
“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, [and] Musick.”
nascent
accoutrement
Eventually I came to enjoy all the art forms that hadn’t impressed me as a teenager, but it took time and exposure. I now realize that my early lack of interest was also born from fear. I believed that understanding art was beyond my capabilities.
It was as if I had internalized the cultural insecurities of the United States.
“For seven years she lived happily on this earth,”
“The harm of a censorship system is not just that it impoverishes intellectual life,”
“It also fundamentally distorts the rational order in which the natural and spiritual worlds are understood. The censorship system relies on robbing a person of the self-perception that one needs in order to maintain an independent existence. It cuts off one’s access to independence and happiness.”
In art, you can find voices that channel your own life story better than you could ever express it yourself.
And you can also find voices that introduce you to worlds you would never have otherwise visited.
Lynn’s catalog of songs is one of the most impressive collections of socially relevant commentary in the history of American music.
epochal
Art is an attempt to capture the truths of the world as you see it in a medium you can share with others.
And for the vast majority of the history of our species, we did not have the power to destroy the planet.
The first modern internal combustion engine was built in the 1870s, and in 1886 German engineer Karl Benz patented the first motorcar. Over the ensuing century and decades, as the environmental movement grew in its scope and importance, Earth was getting sicker.
Nature was not there for us to exploit or toy with.
For too long the cost of doing business ignored the cost of that business to the environment.
It is striking that those who live in urban centers and are more isolated from the natural world tend to vote for Democratic candidates who mostly favor stricter environmental regulations. Meanwhile, those in rural areas tend to vote for Republican candidates who more often advocate for laxer oversight of land, water, and pollution.
The concerns that you hear about pitting economic growth against environmental protections are legitimate; we need a balanced approach.
We will never return to some mythic state of environmental purity.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t be wiser about how we use our limited resources and protect our planet. I believe that if there was leadership on this issue in both political par...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We can hide from the truth for now, but it will not last.
He said those who deny climate change now will ultimately be “mugged by reality.”
The danger is that when the climate deniers are finally
mugged, it will be, by definitio...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Nature has the power to inspire one’s mind and move one’s soul like great music or poetry.
We have seen the undue influence of big money from the fossil fuel industry, along with their allies in government, actively undermine climate science.
To the countless generations yet to be born, what world will we leave for them?
But now, when it is needed with an urgency we haven’t really seen before, we are blinking.
How can we open our eyes once again to the notion of a fragile pl...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
panoply
amber glow of nostalgia,
It is too easy for those who today breezily dismiss the legacy of race and education to forget what happened in places like Oxford. Thousands of students and outside agitators were whipped into a murderous fury.
We still are living in the shadow of this history.
But there should be no dispute that if American schools don’t improve, America will lose its world leadership.
Instead, what we are seeing is a persistent (and in some cases increasing) de facto segregation of schools along fissures of race and economic class, between urban and suburban districts, as well as within cities themselves. We see rising tuitions at public universities and the under-resourcing of community colleges, one of the unheralded backbones of our educational community. We see educational standards based more on politics than
on pedagogy.
And when it comes to training future generations, there are few professions more important than teaching, and yet teachers are compensated at levels o...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
a truly free populace could not remain ignorant, and that communities must provide nonsectarian public schools, staffed by trained teachers and open to students of diverse backgrounds.
