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John Pentland Mahaffy Quotes

Sir John Pentland Mahaffy was an Irish classicist and polymathic scholar.

✵ 26. February 1839 – 30. April 1919
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John Pentland Mahaffy: 2   quotes 0   likes

John Pentland Mahaffy Quotes

“If … we meet a man of acknowledged mental superiority, whether generally or in his special department, it is our social duty by intelligent questioning, by an anxiety to learn from him, to force him to condescend to our ignorance, or join in our fun, till his broader sympathies are awakened, and he plays with us as if we were children. Indeed this very metaphor points out one of the very remarkable instances of social equality asserted by an inferior—I mean the outspoken freedom of the child—which possesses a peculiar charm, and often thaws the dignity or dissipates the reserve of the great man and woman whose superiority is a perpetual obstacle to them in ordinary society.”

John Pentland Mahaffy

Conversation (1896), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=1yEVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Children , Intelligence , Question , Freedom

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