Quotes by Richard Mitchell

“Literacy is not, as it is considered in our schools, a PORTION of education. It IS education. It is at once the ability AND the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and out of knowledge and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values or emotional responses, however worthy, to make judgments.”

“You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian”

“I never even worked on (computers) out on the streets -- never even been on the Internet, ... I didnt even know how to turn them on.”

“There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified educations is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An education that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must teach by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.”

“We have a 15-year contractual agreement that was negotiated with Interface in 2001, ... I think the agreement was signed in January of 2002.”

“We have a 15-year contractual agreement that was negotiated with Interface in 2001. I think the agreement was signed in January of 2002.”

“Green was shooting 3s left and right. Coach told me to guard him real tight. It was all desire and toughness. Our team has no superstars, but we have heart.”

“We had to take it inside. The first half, we were all shooting up 3s and they werent going in.”

“Its going to turn the land into a marsh for the people who live on the end of the street touching the river. We already get wetter than what other parts of the county are used to, but once you start building and moving all that dirt around I can only assume its going to impact those houses.”

“We decided if they would let us march, we wouldnt overly confront them.”

Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.

Training is a good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend, and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all.

Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.

Only in some very special cases is comprehension the point of reading--in things like recipes and reading material. The point of reading is understanding, and comprehension is to understanding as getting wet is to swimming. You must do the one before you can hope to do the other, but you dont do the other simply because you do the one.

And that is to say, of course, that you can read a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

Thats how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldnt matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.