Benjamin

“Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Life’s great dichotomy is between autotrophs, organisms that can nourish themselves, and heterotrophs, or life forms that must feed on other organisms.”
― Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature

“If people can't control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people's behavior.”
― Robin Skynner