Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: Adminstrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being. In schools, adminstrators commonly become myopic as a result of confronting all of the problems the "requirements" generate. Thus they cannot see (or hear) the constituents the system ostensibly exists to serve — the students. The idea that the school should consist of procedures specifically intended to help learners learn strikes many administrators as absurd — and "impractical." …Eichmann, after all, was "just an adminstrator." He was merely "enforcing requirements." The idea of "full time administrators" is palpably a bad one — especially in schools — and we say to hell with it. Most of the "administration" of the school should be a student responsibility. If schools functioned according to the democratic ideals they pay verbal allegience to, the students would long since have played a major role in developing policies and procedures guiding its operation. One of the insidious facts about totalitarianism is its seeming "efficiency." …Democracy — with all of its inefficiency — is still the best system we have so far for enhancing the prospects of our mutual survival. The schools should begin to act as if this were so.
“The best evidence that we are still in a democracy is the fact that there is still an opposition.”
Kap Maceda Aguila, "The Substance of Chiz", People Asia, 2006 June, p. 50, ISSN 0119-657X.
2006
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Francis Escudero 354
Filipino politician 1969Related quotes
television address (4 March 1987)
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)
Quoted in "Boutros Boutros-Ghali: The world is his oyster" by Gamal Nkrumah in Al-Ahram weekly No. 777 (10 - 18 January 2006)
2000s
“The question is: is “democracy” still democratic?”
Speeches
“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
Variant: A bookstore is one of the many pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
"Four Romantic Words" in Words and Idioms : Studies in the English Language (1925), § VI
Context: The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best. The complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought; and it is reached, as I have said, if indeed it is ever reached, by the preliminary processes of recognition, designation, and definition. It is with these preliminary processes that our aesthetic criticism is still occupied.
“Facts are facts! And if they’re impossible, they’re still facts!”
Source: Time Tunnel (1964), Chapter 9 (p. 140).
Tusnádfürdő speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp, 26 July 2014
“However, we must not lose sight of the fact that the fundamentals of the economy are still good.”
The wise words of Brian Cowen, Irish Independent, 6 December 2007 http://www.independent.ie/national-news/budget2008/the-wise-words--of-brian-cowen-1239048.html,
2007
Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), p. 152.