Educators From Canada

"“You’re still down with NWA?” “Why not?” He didn’t even mess with Moon’s implication. “The beats are dope. And they’ve got great flow. You can’t deny that.” “Hitler had great flow, too. And way more fans.”"

"And how did you propose to pay for the apple, if you had no hands? she asked. And the Devil said, Credit. And she asked, Who would give credit to the Devil? And the wicked one answered unto her, You’d be shocked, Toots."

"“I caint believe how foolish—!” “Yes. It was foolish,” said Tirhakah. “But freedom alone does not make men intelligent, nor do chains alone make them fools.”"

"And night descended, October releasing winter to creep forth from its crypt."

"Sometimes we take an extreme position in art, but that may have more to do with expressing our emotions at the time of creation than of our true moral or strategic convictions."

"When we are creating art, we’re not forensically documenting reality, but rather creating doodles and caricatures expressing often passionate arguments about how one could view the world, but not necessarily our own true convictions."

"Novels are long-term relationships, and short stories are flings. In art, as with life, I always opted for relationships."

"People get accustomed to evil like they get accustomed to smog or noise or graffiti! But it doesn’t change what it is."

"People are so lazy, they want everything to be simple, but nothing is simple. Nothing."

"There’s only two types of people in the world, Ye, weird and boring."

"I’m not saying Hamza’s cheap, but if the only thing standing between our solar system and a fleet of intergalactic enslavers was Hamza’s wallet crunched inside his fist, we’d all be drilling methane wells on Pluto right now."

"Loopier than a snake in a garden hose."

"We challenge ourselves to try at least four new bizarrities in every week’s groceries."

"“MAY THE FORCE—” “—FEED YOUR HORSE!”"

"Thursday is practically Friday and Friday is Friday."

"And I slept, and dreamt that I gazed through an electron microscope at the surface of the Guernica. I awoke to moonlight, and was troubled, and did not easily return to sleep."

"You cannot look within, or rather, you refuse to. You fear to. So all of your manipulation of the exterior is ultimately meaningless, because it is devoid of any examined motivation. You seek to change your environment because you fear to gaze at that which makes you want to change it, because you fear that you may have to change yourself."

"In science, one becomes so obsessed with the number of feathers in a bird’s wing or its mass or muscular strength that one forgets the fact of the bird’s flight, or its beauty, or its existence. One forgets the truth of those things. Similarly, the artist who looks only within, without looking to the minutiae of the bird or the air in which the bird flies or the earth below the air, forgets those apparently solid details that may also lead him to truth. If he never bothers to examine a bird’s mass and strength, then his painting or poem can speak only of his own narcissism."

"Experience exists and therefore is true in its mere existence, but perhaps not beyond. It may not be truthful in reference to anything beyond itself. But it may, in unprocessed form, be representative of truth in that it has not become crusted over with the false encoding of theory. And in art, one may, perhaps, create a distillation of experience, which, by being less rigidly composed and dogmatically-formed than science, be flexible enough to represent or transmit truth, or at least, to point towards it."

"“You equate education with a desire to harm learners? Were you a human, I’d say your radicalism were driven by testosterone. In your case, I’d guess motor oil. “Education is not driven by a desire to delude learners or to harm them. On the contrary, it is our noblest activity; we import information—yes, information, the building blocks of knowledge—to students, such that they might assemble their own knowledge-acquisition drives and skills and modes. We educate such that the educated may educate themselves and others. “Indeed, we create the only perpetual motion machine: the self-aware, extra-aware cognitive engine, whose fuel is the world, whose ignition is lesson! We engage not in authoritarianism, but in liberation, for once genuine ignition is achieved, the engine discovers its own fuel; the vehicle, its own momentum."

"“The desire to assert that knowledge is pure subjectivity or that knowledge is never more than mere ill-founded belief is rooted in a twisted admiration for moral relativism, or perhaps worse, in an egocentric belief that ‘the universe is a product of my mind, and nothing else.’”"

"“Knowledge,” he said with overwhelming confidence, “can be dismissed as a collection of beliefs, or as you say, dogma, only by those so deluded with solipsism as to have no faith even in their own existence, let alone the existence of external entities—” “Inaccurate—” “I’m not done. ‘Knowledge’ is clearly the conscious affirmation, or verbal, or textual statement of that which is right and true and that of which scientific inquiry informs us.”"

"Everyone tensed. Rhetorical fingers twitched at the ragged leather of cerebral holsters."

"The ground I sit on is not the ground I sat on. The ground I sat on breathed and moved and shuttered and moaned. The ground I sit on is still and silent. The ground I sat on pushed out green things and was crawled on by all manner of crawling things and walked on by walking things. The ground I sit on feels no pad nor hoof nor foot nor claw. The ground I sat on was belly-earth, was food-land, was eating-soil. The ground I sit on is soot and silt and frost and weed. So I stand."

"You only fight when someone try walk allova you—but when dey do, you fight wit all you got."

"Duty often had undesirable consequences, but if it did not it would be self-indulgence and hedonism."

"It was sunset. It didn’t matter. Whatever aesthetic or soular value sunset once possessed in the collective mind, it had long since been scraped into shreds and dust by concrete and reinforced steel. Scraped and scrapped. The sun and moon had long since been overthrown by Argon, Xenon and Neon."

"There it was again: “-25%”. Four lousy, stinking, meaningless, ugly, putrid, festering, deranged little figures on a page. How was it that something as meaningless is a meaningless scribble on a meaningless paper in a meaningless course with a meaningless professor could have so much damn meaning? Oh, right. Philosophy."

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

"The way of Socrates had shown itself to be a limited way because it concerned itself “only with the scientific investigation of justice and the virtues,” and it had shown itself to be an intransigent way because it chose “non-conformity and death.” Plato corrected the way of Socrates—he removed the limitation and tempered its intransigence."

"Nietzsche discovered the clue to esotericism early … “The fact of the pious fraud.”"

"Strauss’ whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it."

"How can historicism consistently exempt itself from its own verdict that all human thought is historical?"

"Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God."

"May the ability to see many points of view keep us gentle."

"Democracies should be a delirium of choices - more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer."

"The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue."

"Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn't work out in theory."

"We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here."

"The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve."

"Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital."

"Electrical fire and the fire of greed kindle economies. In that flux, nations become digitized commodities on stock-exchange floors and on investors' rating screens. A country becomes a product to be rated for its obedience to paying of deficits and debts."

"There must be engagement: there must be protest."

"The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be."

"If you make things sound inoffensively obvious, then it is likely that no one will listen."

"The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes."

"Canada is like several puzzles that we are all working on at the same time. Everyone has a part to add, but no one has seen the whole picture yet."

"Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness."

"If our dreams can last, then we could turn our time and place to gold."

"Passion was animal flesh, raw desire gnawing and ripping at its early limitations. These passions were to be feared only if undirected by the conscience of the higher self. Mind was the key to the process of enlightenment. Hence reason was the first principle, light itself."