Staggerlee

“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Today, partly because many “conservative” schools have borrowed discriminatingly from progressive innovations, we may easily forget how dismal and self-satisfied the older conservative pedagogy often was, how it accepted, or even exploited, the child’s classroom passivity, how much scope it afforded to excessively domineering teachers, how heavily it depended on rote learning. The main strength of progressivism came from its freshness in method. It tried to mobilize the interests of the child, to make good use of his need for activity, to concern the minds of teachers and educators with a more adequate sense of his nature, to set up pedagogical rules that would put the burden on the teacher not to be arbitrarily authoritative, and to develop the child’s capacity for expression as well as his ability to learn. It had the great merit of being experimental in a field in which too many people thought that all the truths had been established.”
― Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“And today, when Communism has been reduced to a negligible quantity in American domestic life, the cry for a revival of this scapegoat is regularly heard in the land, and investigators who are unable to turn up present Communist affiliations have resorted to stirring up the dead husks of fellow-traveling memories or to obscuring as completely as possible the differences between liberals and Communists. The truth is that the right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up.”
― Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“I believe that the reason there are millions of planets is the same reason there are millions of eggs. To allow for failure. There must be countless experimental stations like this one. The only thing that is not expendable is the experiment itself. Our notions of our own uniqueness are precisely that. Our notions. We will not be missed. When we have slaughtered and poisoned everything in sight and finally incinerated the earth itself then that black and lifeless lump of slag will simply revolve in the void forever. There is a place for it too. A nameless cinder of no consequence even to god. That man can halt this disaster now seems so remote a possibility as to hardly bear consideration.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men