Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value. The American I is deconstructed for me by Paolo, an architect who was raised in Bologna: "You Americans are not truly individualistic, you merely are lonely. In order to be individualistic, one must have a strong sense of oneself within a group." (The "we" is a precondition for saying "I.") Americans spend all their lives looking for a community: a chatroom, a church, a support group, a fetish magazine, a book club, a class action suit... illusions become real when we think they are real and act accordingly. Because Americans thought themselves free of plural pronouns, they began to act as free agents, thus to recreate history. Individuals drifted away from tribe or color or 'hood or hometown or card of explanation, where everyone knew who they were... Americans thus extended the American community by acting so individualistically, so anonymously.
Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 20)
Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator
Source: Reforming Education: The Schooling of a People and Their Education Beyond Schooling (1977), p. 255
John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath
As quoted in "The Mathematician" in The World of Mathematics (1956), by James Roy Newman
Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian
"Towards the Twenty-First Century" (1972), p. 169
The Culture We Deserve (1989)
Context: The only political ism surviving in full strength from the past is nationalism. This was partly to be expected from the liberation of so many colonies simultaneously, beginning in the 1920s. But this nationalism differs from the old in two remarkable ways: it is not patriotic and it does not want to absorb and assimilate. On the contrary, it wants to shrink and secede, to limit its control to its one small group of like-minded-we-ourselves-alone. It is in that sense racist, particularist, sectarian, minority-inspired.
Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer
Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 11 at resologist.net Ch. 11 at sacred-texts.com http://www.sacred-texts.com/fort/damn/damn11.htm
Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist
Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter XXXV The Opportunity Today