“Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.”

"Think Little".
A Continuous Harmony (1972)

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

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty …" by Wendell Berry?
Wendell Berry photo
Wendell Berry 189
author 1934

Related quotes

T.S. Eliot photo

“Mr. Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural — but little developed — aptitude for seriousness.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

The Contemporary English Novelist, La Nouvelle Revue française (1 May 1927)

Thomas Sowell photo

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

Eugene V. Debs photo
Bill Nye photo

“Please, you don't want to raise a generation of science students who don't understand how we know our place in the cosmos, who don't understand natural law.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, 3, Sarah Whitman, Age-old feud: In the beginning, Tampa Bay Times, Florida, February 7, 2014]

Warren Buffett photo
David Gross photo

“Remarkably, the building of the Standard Model — the theory of how particles and forces interact — was the success of the conservatives. It required no revolution at the foundational level. Normal physics, the kind that goes on experiment after experiment, produced the Standard Model.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Waiting for the Revolution" https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130524-waiting-for-the-revolution/, an interview of David Gross by Peter Byrne, Quanta Magazine (2013)

Poemen photo

“How do you advise me to behave? Make friends with anyone who tries to bully you and sell your produce in peace.”

Poemen (340–450) Egyptian monk and desert father

Saying 163

Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo

“Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.”

I
Variant translation: I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever. But that does not make me angry any more. They are all dear to me now even while they laugh at me — yes, even then they are for some reason particularly dear to me. I shouldn't have minded laughing with them — not at myself, of course, but because I love them — had I not felt so sad as I looked at them. I feel sad because they do not know the truth, whereas I know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only man to know the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they will not understand.
As translated by David Magarshack
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)
Context: I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me — and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter — not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it.

Mary McCarthy photo
Anne Applebaum photo

“Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated”

Anne Applebaum (1964) journalist

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/z4AdQy3VCmgC?hl=en (October 30, 2012).

Related topics