Van > Van's Quotes

“Music requires a particular type of education which is simply not given to most people. And, as a result, it’s set further apart. It has a special place. People who are familiar with painting and photography and drama and dance, and so on, cannot talk so easily about music. And yet, as Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, music is potentially the most accessible art form because, with the Apollonian and the Dionysian coming together, it makes a”
― Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

“But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human?”
― Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

“But the general feeling in the neighborhood was that school was for suckers. The dropouts were the ones who said that the most, and of course they usually looked as if they were having the most fun, wearing the best clothes, and making the most loot from drugs and petty scams. Ma said Kathy was starting to get into the drugs, but I already knew that. She said she’d heard that the 8th Street gang was”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“It’s funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain.”
― Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

“Music is a science which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics.”
― Jean-Philippe Rameau, Treatise on Harmony

“Among musical instruments, only the first—the human voice—is more universal than the harmonica. This is appropriate, given that the mouth organ is the most ventriloquial of musical devices. “I throw my voice,” explains Lonnie Glosson, the seller of millions of “talking harmonicas.” DeFord Bailey, harmonica star of the early Grand Ole Opry broadcasts, approached his first mouth organ as an impressionist would: “Oh, I would wear it out, trying to imitate everything I heard! Hens, foxes, hounds, turkeys . . . everything around me.”
― Kim Field, Harmonicas, Harps and Heavy Breathers: The Evolution of the People's Instrument

“Occasionally, however, when chided by their slaves or others, slaveholders did act in concert with the better selves of their paternalist rhetoric. William Green's mother convinced her owner ("she having nursed him when a child") to sell her son in the neighborhood rather than to a slave trader.”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“Some slaves, however, were "too white to keep." That was how Edmund was described by the man who had sold him from Tennessee. The man's hope was that such a sale would make it more difficult for Edmund to escape from slavery, but, as it was, New Orleans suited the slave well: within a day of arriving in the city, Edmund had slipped unnoticed onto a steamboat and disappeared. So, too, Robert, who boarded the steamboat that carried him away from slavery and New Orleans as a white man. "I should have thought he was of Spanish origin," remembered one of his fellow passengers, "he was a man of clear skin and dark complexion." But more than the way Robert looked, the other passengers remembered the way he acted: "he was very genteely dressed and of a very genteel deportment"; "he had more the appearance of a gentleman than a plebeian"; and, almost every witness noted, "usually seated himself at the first table, high up, and near the ladies." Robert, it turned out, had once”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“The vitality associated with blackness might cancel out the vulnerability associated with
femininity in the search for a field hand, while a "bright disposition" might lighten a dark-skinned woman in the search for a domestic servant; a "rough" face might darken a light-skinned man, while "effeminacy" might lighten a dark-skinned one; an outwardly dull demeanor and the presence of wife and child might make a light-skinned man seem less likely to run away; and so on. In the slave market, buyers produced "whiteness" and "blackness" by disaggregating human bodies and recomposing them as racialized slaves.”
― Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

“We are hardwired to hear and make music. Yes, we will sigh with pleasure when we hear a favorite theme played by an orchestra, and who hasn’t felt a stab of nostalgia, or even brushed away a tear, when hearing a song reminiscent of youth or a lost love? However, such exquisite moments notwithstanding, the musical experience represents something far deeper. Broadly defined, music is sound in time. Sound is nothing less than our perception of the vibrations, the movement, of the universe around us. Music is an intensification, a crystallization, a celebration, a glorification, of that movement and those vibrations. Pretty heady stuff. Far beyond spoken language—which, with its sounds in time, might rightly be considered a low-end sort of music—music is a universal language; one need not speak Ashanti in order to groove to West African drumming; or German in order to be emotionally flayed by Beethoven; or English to totally freak when listening to Bruce Springsteen. Say it with flowers? Nah. If you really want to get your expressive point across, say it with music. No human activity”
― Robert Greenberg, How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart

“In 1963, Robert Novak had written that many Republican leaders were intent on converting the Party of Lincoln into the White Man’s Party. The following year, Goldwater went down in crushing defeat, winning only 36 percent of the white vote. Even so, less than a decade later, the racial transmogrification of the Republicans was well underway. In 1972, Nixon’s first full dog whistle campaign netted him 67 percent of the white vote, leaving his opponent, George McGovern, with support from less than one in three whites. Defeated by the Southern strategy, McGovern neatly summed it up: “What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few—and in return, we will try to overlook the”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Kevin Phillips also saw clearly that success lay in stimulating racial antipathies among whites across the country. For Phillips, if there was a regional dynamic at work, it was instead an anti-Northeast one: he predicted that the whole country except the Northeast (and also the sparsely populated and largely white Northwest) would soon turn reliably Republican.44 Phillips argued that those trending”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“After 2012, Republicans controlled all 11 state legislatures of the former Confederacy, and their campaign tactics centered more than ever on depicting themselves as the white party and Democrats as beholden to minorities.48 But this is a far cry from saying that what happens in”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Dog whistling comes out of the South and its preoccupation with blacks, but it always involved equal opportunity racism, and never more so than today.”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“This is not to portray race as simply one among many issues, each with equal weight; instead, race has been the principal weapon in the right’s arsenal against New Deal liberalism. More than any other single concern, over the last half-century racial”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Start with the first half of Phillips’ statement, the claim that economic issues favored the Democrats when government programs “taxed the few for the many.” This represents 1964, when Goldwater assailed the New Deal and lost in a landslide. To this point, liberalism still comprised programs primarily geared toward helping whites. Thus, the “many” were the white middle-class beneficiaries of government programs, and the “few” were the rich who were asked to pay more in taxes. But then Phillips flipped the order, and argued that Democrats began to lose when they began promoting “‘welfare’ that taxed the many for the few.” Here he was talking about the Johnson administration’s effort to extend government aid across the color line, and the white hostility that”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Conservative dog whistling made minorities, not concentrated wealth, the pressing enemy of the white middle class. It didn’t seem to matter that the actual monetary transfers to nonwhites were trivial. If all of the anti-poverty and social welfare dollars paid to blacks during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had instead been given to low- and middle-income whites,”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Racial attacks on liberalism shifted the enemy of the middle class from big money to lazy minorities, and transmuted economic programs that helped to build the nation into welfare for undeserving groups.”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“This hostility against intellectual and cultural elites had antecedents in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks in the 1950s, and arguably more generally forms a persistent streak in American politics.61 In terms of culture war”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“The ostensible culprit is liberalism’s bitterly contested remedies which asked too much of whites. Yet this ignores the long history, in the North as well as the South, of white opposition to virtually any easing in racial oppression. Even modest efforts at ameliorating discrimination”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Wallace, Goldwater, and Nixon recognized and sought to take advantage of existing bigotry in the voting public, bigotry they did not create but which they stoked, legitimized, and encouraged. They did so not to inflict further pain and humiliation on nonwhites, though that consequence was sure to follow from their actions. Rather, they were willing to play racial hardball to get elected. These racial demagogues acted out of strategic racism. This chapter’s principal”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Alabama in 1927 alone, 27,701 men were arrested on misdemeanor charges and offered for sale by county sheriffs. In Blackmon’s estimation, “roughly half of all African Americans—or 4.8 million—lived in the Black Belt region of the South in 1930, the great majority of whom were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor.”15”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Even so, unlike most in society, these politicians thought long and deep about how to turn race to their advantage. We’ve previously defined strategic racism as purposeful efforts to use racial animosity as leverage to gain political power (or material wealth and social standing). By this definition, Wallace, Goldwater, and Nixon acted out of strategic racism. This last sentence sparks an important clarification.”
― Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

“Sadly, part of what Guinier and other parents must prepare their Black sons for is the prospect, and even the probability, that the group he is most likely to experience conflict and hostility with is not the police or the Ku Klux Klan but other Black males. For reasons that can never be fully explained, Black males kill and harm one another at a rate that far exceeds any other segment of the American population (Bell and Jenkins, 1990; Earls, 1994). The alarming homicide rates among young Black males is one of the major factors that has led to Black males being the only segment of the U.S. population with a declining life expectancy (Earls, 1994). Gangs, drug dealing, and the availability of guns are certainly contributing factors, but there is more going on related to the phenomenon of violence among and between Black males that defies easy explanation.”
― Pedro A. Noguera, The Trouble With Black Boys: ...And Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education

“Several researchers have found that the pressures that Black men and boys experience exact a toll on their (our)1 psychological and emotional well-being. How they respond to these pressures is undoubtedly a factor that contributes to the high rate of interpersonal violence between and among Black males.”
― Pedro A. Noguera, The Trouble With Black Boys: ...And Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education

“Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters’ as well as the author’s), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.”
― Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

“The only way to improve your skills is to push beyond the boundaries of your own abilities.  This means you are going to make mistakes.  Yep, it’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. If you are not making any mistakes or feeling like you are failing, then I question whether or not you are truly trying.  Are you really putting enough effort into it? Being willing to risk the emotional pain and embarrassment of making a mistake is absolutely essential if you ever want to get any better.”
― Teresa Rose, 75 Ways You Can Improve Your Music Practice

“If things have always come easily to you, being challenged will appear frustrating.  It’s not because you don’t need the challenge.  It’s because you are not used to being challenged.  You need to learn patience and perseverance.  Have an attitude of being willing to work hard throughout the rest of your life.  Giving up is not an option no matter how difficult it gets.”
― Teresa Rose, 75 Ways You Can Improve Your Music Practice

“I’ve seen too many people give up when the going gets tough.  It’s not that they couldn’t do it.  They just didn’t want to do it.  When you’re used to being able to do everything very easily, the temptation is to run away from challenges instead of tackling them directly.  Stop running and start”
― Teresa Rose, 75 Ways You Can Improve Your Music Practice

“there are no short-cuts. ”
― Teresa Rose, 75 Ways You Can Improve Your Music Practice