Educators From The United States

"Of course, you can sit down and have something you want to say. But then you must let its expression be born in you and on the paper. Don't hold too tight; allow it to come out how it needs to rather than trying to control it."

"First, consider the pen you write with. Think, too, about your notebook. […] A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another. Also, it is easy to carry."

"Writers write about things that other people don't pay much attention to. […] A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, […] When we live in a place for too long, we grow dull. We don't notice what is around us. That is why a trip is so exciting. We are in a new place and see everything in a fresh way."

"Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. […] Some techniques are appropriate at some times and some for other times. Every moment is different. Different things work. One isn't wrong and the other right. In class we try different techniques or methods."

"A million-plus readers have followed Natalie's bold plunge into the world of words. "Just dive in," urges Natalie, teaching, "Begin where you are." […] "Keep your hand moving," she commands. "Don't cross out, don't worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar, lose control, don't think, don't get logical, go for the jugular." "Include original detail," Natalie urges her students."

"You tell the truth and you depict it in detail."

"I went home with the resolve to write what I knew and to trust my own thoughts and feelings and to not look outside myself. I was not in school anymore: I could say what I wanted."

"Just write. Just write. Just write. [...] When we are in the heart of writing it doesn't matter where we are. We can write anyplace."

"I just think she’s masterful. She gets such incredible answers that these famous people haven’t said to anyone else, which requires this diabolical scheming but also tremendous empathy. It’s a very specific kind of puzzle."

"And in the emergency we welcome cordially the liberal aid of our Northern brethren, who have done, especially in the important matter of education institutions, a work which in our crippled condition it would have been impossible for the South to have undertaken, or to carry through. Let us each do all we can in this great enterprise."

"First and foremost, he needs to be fairly treated. To have the truth [told] about him, the whole truth if practicable, but at all events to nothing but the truth; to have fair opportunities to labor, and to get honest pay for [it, to] have a chance to become educated and to develop whatever there is [in] him, in good and noble directions, in short to have a fair field.Next, and mainly, our colored brethren need the gospel.I shall not draw any terrible picture of their deplorable state, with a good deal of red in the brush, for two reasons—first, they would not be true; and second, there is no need of them. There is enough to rouse any thoughtful man to action in the fact that here in our midst is to be found a nation with in a nation, twice as great in number today as the whole American people were one hundred years ago, when our independence was achieved. They are said to number now not less than seven millions..."

"The only way then to deal with the black man whom we find in America—is to give him his rights, cordially, frankly, fully.The freedman is a man, neither more nor less. And it is not so much as a freedman that we are concerned about him. It is rather as a freeman. Whatever he was, this thing is certain—he is now a freeman, by the highest organic law of our government, by the constitution of the United States, by the separate action of the respective states. His past condition of servitude is not unimportant, as affecting his present state and our present responsibilities. But the momentous question is not what he was, but what he is, and especially what he is going to be. And with that question we have something to do.He is not a babe, to be fondled and petted. He is not a brute, to be trampled and despised. He is not a fiend or a savage to be shunned and dreaded, nor an angel to be admired and flattered. He is simply a man, with the capabilities and duties of any other man, so far as he is competent to discharge them, liable to the same temptations and frailties, heir of the same immortality, and redeemed by the same precious blood..."

"RULE 4 The rate of various living processes varies with size, such as metabolism, generation time, longevity, and the speed of locomotion."

"RULE 5 The abundance of organisms in nature varies with their size."

"First, there was a selection for an increase in size by becoming multicellular, and once achieved there was a selection for better integration, a better coordination of the adhering cells to compete effectively for energy and for a way to reproduce successfully. Then, which each successive step of size increase, propelled always by the fact the uppermost size niche is never filled, there has been a further selection pressure for integration and coordination, often by new and innovative devices to accommodate the newly created larger organism."

"RULE 1 Strength varies with size."

"RULE 2 Surfaces that permit diffusion of oxygen, of food, of heat in and out of the body, vary with size."

"RULE 3 The division of labor (complexity) varies with size."

"Merino sheep always flock while Highland sheep spread. The reason is that in Spain the summer feeding and winter feeding of the sheep were widely separated, and the shepherd had to march them many miles along the road and through the villages. If they did not flock, they would soon be lost in their seasonal journey. On the other hand, the Scottish shepherd never moves his Highland sheep large distances and wishes them to spread out as much as possible over the hills so that no one area is overgrazed, and both of these characteristics have been achieved by selective breeding."

"Tylor's evolutionary anthropology, carried on by such successors as R. R. Marett and Henry Balfour, became the central tradition of British anthropology, but the emphasis gradually shifted from Tylor's concern with bellief and custom to the more tanglible areas of social organization, economics, and material culture."

"Geron's board was a Who's Who of telomere research, with a little biological stardust thrown in. It included Carol Greider (who ran a lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory now), Woody Wright and Jerry Shay, Michael West's former mentors at the University of Texas; James Watson, the famed codiscoverer of the double helix; and, for historical, scientific, and even sentimental reasons, Leonard Hayflick."

"Since the first cell culture was set at the beginning of the twentieth century it was believed that all cultured cells, if provided with the proper conditions, would replicate indefinitely. Sixty years later we overthrew this dogma by finding that normal cells have a finite capacity to replicate and that only abnormal or cancer cell populations can replicate indefinitely. We interpreted these findings to bear on our understanding of the aging process. If, as had been previously thought, normal cells can replicate indefinitely, then age changes could not have an intracellular origin. Our findings demonstrated that, on the contrary, age changes do have an intracellular origin. The hundreds of changes that were subsequently found to precede the loss of replicative capacity have been interpreted to be age changes and the finitude of replication to be an expression of longevity determination. Subsequent findings by others have determined the molecular mechanism that governs the finitude of normal cell replicative capacity and how immortal cancer cells escape this inevitability."

"Freud in fact defines hysteria as the conflict of two incompatible wishes, as Hegel defined tragedy as the conflict of two incompatible necessities."

"Age-related sensory changes can be traced to degeneration in some of the cells and cell products that compose the sense organ itself."

"Natural selection favors animals that are most likely to become reproductively successful by developing better survival strategies and greater reserve capacity in vital systems to better escape predation, disease, accidents, and environmental extremes. Natural selection diminishes after reproductive success because the species will not benefit from members favored for greater longevity. The level of physiological reserve remaining after reproductive maturity determines longevity and evolves incidental to the selection process that acts on earlier developmental events. Physiological reserve does not renew at the same rate that it incurs losses because molecular disorder increases at a rate greater than the capacity for repair. These are age changes, and they increase vulnerability to predation, accidents, or disease."

"In general, Eble's estimate of Fitzgerald's work seems to me just, even his suggestion that The Great Gatsby may be the greatest novel between Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye."

"For years after he joined the Bennington faculty his course, "Myth-Ritual-Literature," was said to be the most popular undergraduate offering of the college."

"Reflecting on their friendship many years later, Ellison would credit Hyman as a crucial influence on his fiction. If Ellison was struggling with a project, Hyman often stepped in to encourage him. In 1943, when Ellison was about to ship out to the merchant marine, Hyman urged him first to finish 'Flying Home,' the story that would be his breakthrough work."

"You must know the physiology behind the art. All the ‘pink clouds’ in the world won’t help you move through the passaggio."

"I don't play this work as a tour de force, as a dazzling display of technique--I play it as a life experience."

"Technique without art is shallow and doomed. Art without technique is insulting."

"Peabody’s wife remembered him saying, “I am absolutely sure that this little lecture will be remembered long after anything of a scientific nature I have written has been forgotten.”"

"He liked people. He had delightful social qualities, and concealed a seriousness of mind and a great earnestness of purpose under a delightful and winning humor."

"Dr. Francis W. Peabody was still a young man when he wrote one of the great classics of American medicine, The Care of the Patient. He knew he was suffering of malignant disease at the time when he gave his address to the Harvard graduating class on October 21, 1926, and he died one year later at age 47."

"...it is much easier to make a wrong diagnosis than it is to unmake it."

"My own professional and personal experience has shown me that morphine is the gift of God, but depending upon how it is used it may be either “God’s Own Medicine” or “The Devil’s Own Poison.”"

"The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient."

"What is spoken of as a clinical picture is not just a photograph of a sick man in bed; it is an impressionistic painting of the patient surrounded by his home, his work, his relations, his friends, his joys, sorrows, hopes and fears. Now all of this background of sickness which bears so strongly on the symptomatology is liable to be lost sight of in the hospital."

"Look out for all the little incidental things that you can do for his comfort. These, too, are part of the care of the patient. Some of them will fall technically in the field of nursing but you will always be profoundly grateful for any nursing technic that you have acquired. It is worth your while to get the nurse to teach you the right way to feed a patient, change the bed, or give a bedpan."

"People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. / Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. / Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. / Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. / Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. / Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. / Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs./ Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. / Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. / Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. / Give the world the best you have anyway."

"Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within…"

"I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

"Imprisonment schooling has no justification in science, common sense, or history. Get your children out of such schools if you want them to be educated. School means living up to the expectations of total strangers; education involves meeting your own expectations—GOAL SCHOOLS ARE UTTERLY INDIFFERENT TO."

"[M]andatory public education in this country … was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending such a herd via public education."

"School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently."

"You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States."

"The idea of schooling free men in anything would have revolted Athenians. Forced training was for slaves. Among free men, learning was self-discipline, not the gift of experts."

"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered."

"This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that."

"Don't get me wrong, American schooling has been replete with chicanery from its very beginnings. Indeed, it isn't difficult to find various conspirators boasting in public about what they pulled off. But if you take that tack you'll miss the real horror of what I'm trying to describe, that what has happened to our schools was inherent in the original design for a planned economy and a planned society laid down so proudly at the end of the nineteenth century. I think what happened would have happened anyway-without the legions of venal, half-mad men and women who schemed so hard to make it as it is. If I'm correct, we're in a much worse position than we would be if we were merely victims of an evil genius or two."