Mandi > Mandi's Quotes

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.”
― John Taylor Gatto

“I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.”
― John Taylor Gatto

“I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”
― Howard Zinn

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. ”
― Pericles

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”
― Ronald Reagan

“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”
― Mark Twain

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“We bear the consequences for what we have done to ourselves, and for the sin that rules this world. Jesus forgave the thief, but he didn't take him down off the cross.”
― Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind

“Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully displayed it in public. It was those with moral values who could no longer freely walk in a public park without having to witness a revolting display.
What happened to the public censors who protected the majority of citizenry from moral decadence? Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency? Did freedom mean anyone could do anything they wanted anytime they wanted, without consequences?”
― Francine Rivers, A Voice in the Wind

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm -- say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on! ”
― Kate Wiggin, The Birds' Christmas Carol: Great for Holiday and Christmas Reading or Gifting

“Education is the process of selling someone on books. ”
― Douglas Wilson

“God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents...”
― Douglas Wilson

“To reject Christ because the church has sin of this sort in it is like rejecting hospitals because they are full of sick people.”
― Douglas Wilson

“This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.”
― Douglas Wilson

“But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.”
― Douglas Wilson, Is Christianity Good for the World?

“Those who choose to be servants know the most about being free. ”
― Janette Oke

“Impatience can cause wise people to do foolish things. ”
― Janette Oke

“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate & special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the suposition that every child is an idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself...”
― Helen Keller

“Error is better than apathy. Error can be corrected in time to change the outcome. Apathy is seldom corrected until it is too late.”
― G. Edward Griffin

“It is out of character for a country that prides itself on intellectual freedom to put the education of its young in the hands of the state.”
― David Kelley

“One of the sweet things about pain and sorrow is that they show us how well we are loved, how much kindness there is in the world, and how easily we can make others happy in the same way when they need help and sympathy.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Jack and Jill

“I ask not for any crown
But that which all may win;
Nor try to conquer any world
Except the one within.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”
― Amos Bronson Alcott, Tablets

“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.”
― George Burns

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
― George Burns

“...stooping very low, He engraves with care
His Name, indelible, upon our dust;
And from the ashes of our self-despair,
Kindles a flame of hope and humble trust.
He seeks no second site on which to build,
But on the old foundation, stone by stone,
Cementing sad experience with grace,
Fashions a stronger temple of His own.”
― Patricia St. John, Patricia St. John Tells Her Own Story