Interview in Writers at Work (1988)
Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy (1916)
Misc. Quotes
Context: It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
p. 82 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t2g73zj2z;view=1up;seq=100
The Ancient Greek Historians (1909)
In an interview to the World Association of Newspapers for World Press Freedom Day (3 May 2004)
Context: It's an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. That should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it's become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it's "difficult" justify our own inaction. Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don't have is the will, and that's not a reason that history will accept.
As quoted in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
The Opening to the Future http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2011/01/20/06-08-1964.pdf (1964)
Context: To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.
On using personal history in “Fruits of the Same Tree: An Interview with Stephanie Powell Watts” https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-stephanie-powell-watts/ in Fiction Writers Review (2012 Aug 6)
