“For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds.”

— John Ruskin , book Fors Clavigera

Fors Clavigera,, letter xlii, ( 1 June 1874 https://archive.org/stream/forsclavigera02ruskiala#page/204/mode/2up; quoted by William Archer in America To-Day).
Fors Clavigera (1871-1878 and 1880-1884)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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John Ruskin 133

English writer and art critic 1819–1900

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: understanding your potential discovering the hidden you

“Honor, I thought. For real: the guardians should have taught it. Because I hadn't learned it.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“Once we have tasted the juice of words, our mind can no longer pass them by. We drink thought from them.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," http://www.bartleby.com/229/5004.html letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

“The most advanced socialist thought in England is Raymond Williams’ superbly intricate and persuasive work… Any English Marxism will have to measure itself against this landmark in our social thought.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Perry Anderson, " Socialism and pseudo-empiricism http://newleftreview.org/static/assets/archive/pdf/NLR03401.pdf." New Left Review 35 (1966): 2-42; as cited in: Blackledge, Paul. Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left. Merlin Press, 2004. p. 91.

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

“Dmitry confessed once that he learned English hoping to play in England one day.”

Dmitri Bulykin (1979) Russian association football player

(Yuri Zavarzin, former owner of FC Dynamo)<ref> Мартин ГАШЕК ПОЧЕМУ БЫ БРАТУ-ДОМИНАТОРУ ТАКЖЕ НЕ ПОИГРАТЬ В "ДИНАМО"?! http://footbik.narod.ru/RF2004/obz_kom/obzorDYNAMO2.htm

“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought;
what is necessary is only to try to think them again.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden.
Man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken.
Bk. II, Observations in the Mindset of the Wanderer: Art, Ethics, Nature
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) (1821–1829)
Variant: All truly wise thoughts have been thoughts already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.

“They say we must not on any account "Americanise" our institutions…They tell us in America numbers overwhelm property and education. Well, but numbers have not overwhelmed property and education in England, and yet look at legislation in England. Look at our wars, look at our debt, look at our taxes, look at this great fact—that every improvement of the last forty years has been an improvement which numbers, and numbers only, have wrested from the property, and what they call the education of the country. Our education is fairly represented by our Universities, but I say now, as I have said before, that if the Legislature of England, if the Parliament of England, had been guided for thirty years past according to the counsels of the representatives from the Universities, England, instead of being a country of law and of order, would have been long before this a country of anarchy and of revolution.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Birmingham (27 October 1858), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 271-272.
1850s

“You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

Address to Polaroid employees at Symphony Hall in Boston, Massachusetts (5 February 1960), as quoted in Insisting on the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (1998) by Victor K. McElheny, p. 198
Context: The world is a scene changing so rapidly that it takes every bit of intuitive ability you have, every brain cell each one of you has, to make the sensible decision about what to do next. You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

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John Ruskin 133

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