Centenarians

"It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that."

"If Putin uses the atomic bomb, Russia will be destroyed."

"Negotiations need to begin in the next two months ... before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would turn it into a war not be about the freedom of Ukraine ... but a new war against Russia itself. ... Parties should be brought to peace talks within the next two months. Ukraine should've been a bridge between Europe and Russia, but now, as the relationships are reshaped, we may enter a space where the dividing line is redrawn and Russia is entirely isolated. ... We are facing a situation now where Russia could alienate itself completely from Europe and seek a permanent alliance elsewhere. This may lead to Cold War-like diplomatic distances, which will set us back decades. We should strive for long-term peace..."

"George left us at a moment when our national arguments are too often vindicated by passion rather than reason, by the debasement of the adversary rather than the uplifting of purposes. He also believed that if you were blessed with great gifts, you had a responsibility to apply yourself, and if you cared about your country, you had a duty to defend and improve it. He was skilled in presenting his convictions, but above all practiced the art of making controversy superfluous by encouraging mutual respect. Trust, George used to say, is the coin of the realm."

"The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally."

"An understanding between Washington and Beijing is the essential prerequisite for the denuclearization of Korea. By an ironic evolution, China at this point may have an even greater interest than the U.S. in forestalling the nuclearization of Asia. Beijing runs the risk of deteriorating relations with America if it gets blamed for insufficient pressure on Pyongyang. Since denuclearization requires sustained cooperation, it cannot be achieved by economic pressure. It requires a corollary U.S.-Chinese understanding on the aftermath, specifically about North Korea’s political evolution and deployment restraints on its territory."

"Both countries [the United States and China] consider themselves exceptional. The United States believes that our exceptionalism entitles us to educate others because if they adopt our principles, the world will be more peaceful. The Chinese do not strive for conversion. In their view, if you do not belong to Chinese culture, you can never become fully Chinese. Thus, they feel America has no moral right to intervene in their domestic affairs. Their analogy to conversion is that the majesty of their performance will so awe other societies that they will follow enough of the Chinese pattern to become cultural and political tributaries."

"Few countries in history have started more wars or caused more turmoil than Russia in its eternal quest for security and status. It is also true, however, that at critical junctures Russia has saved the world’s equilibrium from forces that sought to overwhelm it: from the Mongols in the 16th century, from Sweden in the 18th century, from Napoleon in the 19th century, and from Hitler in the 20th century. In the contemporary period, Russia will be important in overcoming radical Islam, partly because it is home to some 20 million Muslims, particularly in the Caucasus and along Russia’s southern border. Russia will also be a factor in the equilibrium of Asia."

"For 400 years, world history was made by Europeans. Many of the great ideas by which we live — constitutional government, freedom of the individual, the ideas of the Enlightenment — originated in Europe and were spread by Europe around the world. Now this region, which was dynamic and built the world, has become too preoccupied with itself. It confines itself basically to the exercise of soft power. At present, no European government has the capacity to ask its people for sacrifices on behalf of foreign policy. Unless Europe can recover some of its historic dynamism, there will be a big hole in the world system as it has until now manifested itself."

"Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans—killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon’s inauguration—was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response."

"In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role."

"Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them. Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States. The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then."

"Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union."

"Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance."

"American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China's exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China. But it is the heir of the Middle Kingdom tradition, which formally graded all other states as various levels of tributaries based on their approximation to Chinese cultural and political forms; in other words, a kind of cultural universality."

"The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live...In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threaten China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world."

"Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it."

"I remember something Stanley Kunitz once told me. He said, "Poetry explores depths of thought and feeling that civilization requires for its survival.""

"I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature."

"In the best painting as in authentic poetry one is aware of moral pressures exerted... choices are important, moral pressure exists to make right and wrong choices."

"I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes."

"I don't allow anyone to talk to me like that. So you're lucky — you're a teacher."

"Teaching here isn't so bad. Once you accept as one of the ineluctable laws of nature that kids will continue to say "Silas Mariner" and "Ancient Marner" and "between you and I" and "mischievious" and that the administration will continue to use phrases like "egregious conduct" and "ethnic background" you can go on from there."

"We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it."

"I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance."

"My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window."

"One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them.""

"Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!" The reply, of course, is: "That's just it."

"Paul asks how I would have handled a love letter from a student. I don't know — by talking, maybe, by listening. I don't know. How sad that we don't hear each other — any of us. Major issues are submerged by minor ones; catastrophes by absurdities."

"Being a female, she spurns him on."

"A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect."

"When I tried to tell McHabe that it would have been more valuable to let Ferone keep his appointment with me than to kick him out, he let me have it: "When you're in the system as long as I," he said (They all say that!) "you'll realize it isn't understanding they need. I understand them all right — they're no good.""

"With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know."

"Frances Egan, the school nurse, left her nutrition charts long enough to tell me there was nothing that could have been done. "Evelyn had a rough time with her father," she said. "Once she came in beaten black and blue." "What did you do for her?" "I gave her a cup of tea." "Tea? Why tea, for heaven's sake?" "Why? Because I know all about it," she said, shaking with anger. "I know more than anyone here what goes on outside — poverty, disease, dope, degeneracy — yet I'm not supposed to give them even a band-aid. I used to plead, bang on my desk, talk myself hoarse arguing with kids, parents, welfare, administration, social agencies. Nobody really heard me. Now I give them tea. At least, that's something." "But you're a nurse," I said helplessly. She showed me the Directive from the Board posted on her wall: THE SCHOOL NURSE MAY NOT TOUCH WOUNDS, GIVE MEDICATION, REMOVE FOREIGN PARTICLES FROM THE EYE... Are we, none of us, then, allowed to touch wounds? What is the teacher's responsibility? And if it begins at all, where does it end?"

"If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!"

"How can I take seriously such mimeographed absurdities as "Lateness due to absence," "High under-achiever," and "Polio consent slips"? —SylDear Syl, I'll match yours any day with "Please disregard the following." —Bea"

"Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it."

"Your lesson plan is excellent — except for the Emily Dickinson line: "There is no frigate like a book." The sentiment is lovely, the quotation is apt — only trouble is the word "frigate." Just try to say it in class — and your lesson is over."

"The ceiling fell? The ink ran dry? A student dared to smile? Of every new disaster I prove myself the master By sending out more circulars, more circulars to file! A missing kid? A kissing kid? A paper on the floor? For every major crisis One remedy suffices: More circulars, more circulars, to put into a drawer!A crowded cafeteria? A substitute's hysteria? A visitor from Syria? A missing Book Receipt?I merely send out circulars To add to other circulars To add to other circulars Numerical and neat!"

"In Memory of Those Who Died Waiting for the Bell"

"You teachers are all alike, dishing out crap and expecting us to swallow it and then give it back to you, nice and neat, with a place in it for the mark to go in. But you're even phonier than the others because you put on this act — being a dame you know how — and you stand there pretending that you give a damn. Who you kidding? We're dirt to you, just like you're dirt to the fatheads and whistle-blowers who run this jail, and they're dirt to the swindlers and horn-tooters who run the school system."

"Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did."

"Like most chairmen, he teaches only one class of Seniors; the most experienced teachers are frequently promoted right out of the classroom!"

"The cardinal sin, strange as it may seem in an institution of learning, is talking. There are others, of course — sins, I mean, and I seem to have committed a good number. Yesterday I was playing my record of Gielgud reading Shakespeare. I had brought my own phonograph to school (no one could find the Requisition Forms for "Audio-Visual Aids" — that's the name for the school record player) and I had succeeded, I thought, in establishing a mood. I mean, I got them to be quiet, when — enter Admiral Ass, in full regalia, epaulettes quivering with indignation. He snapped his fingers for me to stop the phonograph, waited for the turntable to stop turning, and pronounced: "There will be a series of three bells rung three times indicating Emergency Shelter Drill. Playing records does not encourage the orderly evacuation of the class.""

"During what was presumably my lunch period, Admiral Ass (a Mr. McHabe, who signs himself Adm. Asst.) appeared in my room with Joe Ferone. "This boy is on probation," he said. "Did he show up in homeroom this morning?" "Yes," I said. "Any trouble?" the Admiral asked. There we stood, the three of us, taking each other's measure. Ferone was watching through narrowed eyes. "No. No trouble," I said."

"The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun."

"When I had asked why they were taking English, a boy said: "To help us in real life.""

"The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble."

"Picture you upon my knee, Just tea for two and two for tea"

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."