Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: We can justify the list we will submit on several grounds. First, many of these questions have literally been asked by children and adolescents when they are permitted to respond freely to the challenge of "What's Worth Knowing?" Second, some of these questions are based on careful listening to students, even though they were not at the time asking questions. Very often children make declarative statements about things when they really mean only to elicit an informative response. In some cases, they do this because they have learned from adults that it is "better" to pretend that you know than to admit that you don't. (An old aphorism describing this process goes: Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.) In other cases they do this because they do not know how to ask certain kinds of questions. In any event, a simple translation of their declarative utterances will sometimes produce a great variety of deeply felt questions.
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.”
Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 360
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Richard Dawkins 322
English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941Related quotes
“Maybe it’s like being a parent, you never really see your children as adults.”
Source: The Burning Page (2016), Chapter 12 (p. 145)
Context: Maybe it’s like being a parent,” she said, bringing up a Library map. “You never really see your children as adults. “You’re exaggerating,” Kai said, with the easy confidence of someone who hadn’t tested the issue yet.
The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference
Context: p>We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.</p
Auxiliary bishop ordained for Kuching archdiocese https://catholicnews.sg/2015/10/12/auxiliary-bishop-ordained-for-kuching-archdiocese/ (12 October 2015)
“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”
“First law of gossip—there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it.”
Source: Moon Over Soho (2011), Chapter 11, “Those Foolish Things” (p. 239)
“First your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life.”
“It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility."”
The Great Comic Book Heroes http://books.google.com/books?id=zxbuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+is+not+size+or+age+or+childishness+that+separates+children+from+adults+It+is+responsibility%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage (1965)