“The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 23.
Context: To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective.
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Aleister Crowley 142
poet, mountaineer, occultist 1875–1947Related quotes
Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 151
“Our first task therefore must be to persuade people.”
An Anarchist Programme (1920)
Markings (1964)
Context: Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity — intellectual, emotional, and moral.
Respect for the word — to employ it with scrupulous care and in incorruptible heartfelt love of truth — is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.
To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes Man to regress down the long path of his evolution.
"But I say unto you, that every idle word that men speak..."
18 May 2000
Comments on the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission
“Sometimes when you feed on another’s word you must eat it like a banana – you peel it first.”
Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978