Quotes about grade
page 2

“In truth, elite education has become a cattle brand. It signifies lots of things other than knowledge: for some, politically correct certification; for others, good test scores and grades that got them in; for a few, later entry into the alumni ranks of high business, law, academia, government, and the media.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, The Deflation of the Academic Brand (2018)

Truth, Education, Law, Business

“The validity of g is most conspicuous in scholastic performance, not because g-loaded tests measure specifically what is taught in school, but because g is intrinsic to learning novel material, grasping concepts, distinctions, and meanings… The most critical tool for scholastic learning beyond the primary grades— reading comprehension—is probably the most highly g-loaded attainment in the course of elementary education.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: The g factor: The science of mental ability (1998), p. 270; As cited in: Melissa A. Bray, Thomas J. Kehle (2011) The Oxford Handbook of School Psychology. p. 65

Education, School, Learning, Reading

“Generals and Majors ah ah
They're never too far
away from men who made the grade
out in a world of their own
They'll never come down
until the battle's lost or made”

Colin Moulding (1955) English bassist, songwriter and vocalist

"Generals And Majors"
Black Sea (1980)

Men, World

“When [my mother] saw we were not going to be able to go back [to Cuba] it became increasingly important for her to make our culture very prevalent and very important in our lives -- and in our household. We spoke only Spanish. I didn't learn English until I went to school in first grade. And the [Cuban] music and the food was very much a part of our life. I'm glad for that, because it is as well for my children.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

BBC radio interview (December 13, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life, Children, School, Food

“The scalar principle is the same form in organization that is sometimes called hierarchical. But, to avoid all definitional variants, scalar is here preferred. A scale means a series of steps, something graded. In organization it means the grading of duties, not according to different functions, for this involves another principle of organization, but according to degrees of authority and corresponding responsibility. For convenience we shall call this phenomenon of organization the scalar chain. The common impression regards this scale or chain merely as a "type" of organization, characteristic only of the vaster institutions of government, army, church, and industry. This impression is erroneous. It is likewise misleading, for it seems to imply that the scalar chain in organization lacks universality. These great organizations differ from others only in that the chain is longer. The truth is that wherever we find an organization even of two people, related as superior and subordinate, we have the scalar principle. This chain constitutes the universal process of coordination, through which the supreme coordinating authority becomes effective throughout the entire structure.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 94-95; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 251-252

People, Truth, Universe

“This case is all about creating a public sob story. There is no homophobic behaviour in Brazil. Those who die, 90% of homosexual deaths, they die in drug related situations, in prostitution, or even killed by their own partners. I went into battle with the gays because the government proposed anti-homophobia classes for the junior grades, but that would actively stimulate homosexuality in children from 6 years old. This is not normal.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

About the kidnapping and murder of the teenager Alexandre Ivo by skinheads in 2010, in an interview to Stephen Fry in October 2013. Jair Bolsonaro provoca polêmica em documentário do ator Stephen Fry sobre homofobia https://vejasp.abril.com.br/blog/pop/jair-bolsonaro-provoca-polemica-em-documentario-do-ator-stephen-fry-sobre-homofobia/. Veja SP (23 October 2013).

Death, Children

“This process has suggested some workable alternatives as solutions to personal housing needs. Here they are in the form of seven axioms… 1. When building your home, pay as you go. 2. Supply your own labor. 3. Build according to your best judgement. 4. Use native materials whenever possible. 5. Design and plan your own home. 6. Use minimum but quality grade hand tools. 7. Assume responsibility for your building construction.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Home, Housing, Personality

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person who you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real--but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)

Love, Life, People, Feeling

“These recent events cause me to withdraw even further away from the world. I drowned all of my misery in my online games. World of Warcraft was the only thing I had left to live for. My grades at Crespi dropped dramatically. I just didn’t care anymore. I hated that school. I didn’t think about my future. The only thing I gave any serious thought to was my WoW character. I had become very powerful in the game, and I was in one of the best guilds. With this guild, I participated in lots of five-hour raid events to collect better gear and armor for my character.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Pastimes

Hate, World, School, Game

“Sometimes I leave my room in a bit of a mess," he giggles. "And I can't do tricks on my skateboard. I just sit on it and roll down the hill. But although it sounds corny I get good grades at everything at school. But I'm not a swot. Honestly.”

Joseph McManners (1992) British singer, actor

Interview with British Newspaper The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk:

School

“…no matter whether it was day, evening, or weekend, because she was an FBI agent, Nicole had to be fit and ready for duty at all times. She rarely drank more than a single glass of wine in the evening, and she carried her Glock to dinner, to the grocery store, and to her kid’s third-grade play”

Lis Wiehl (1961) American legal scholar

Source: Heart of Ice A Triple Threat Novel with April Henry (Thomas Nelson), pp. 10, 11

Wine, Time

“I've been playing since fifth grade. I've never played more poorly than I did today. I've never been more disappointed in myself.”

Jon Kitna (1972) American football quarterback

Remarks after losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers http://scores.espn.go.com/nfl/recap?gameId=221013004 13 October 2002.

Disappointment

“We must give our children the equal opportunity to develop their minds and bodies to the fullest. We will continue, even expand, the conditional cash transfers (or CCT's) to the poorest families so that their children will have the means to get to school and the nutrition to support a healthy brain - and body. We must cut down drastically that 34% drop-out rate in primary grades.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Children, School, Family, Support

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Quoted in "The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age" by Richard C. Duncan http://dieoff.org/page125.htm Originally from Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).

Intelligence, Sense

“That's what I wanted! I wanted to be an athlete, I wanted the girls to like me, and I wanted to be able to get good grades in school, and this man said I could do all that.”

Jack LaLanne (1914–2011) American exercise instructor

In "Jack LaLanne dies at 96; spiritual father of U.S. fitness movement, LosAngeles Times"

School, Girl

“I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these difficult times, a letter from a fourth grade girl with a father in the military. As much as I don't want my dad to fight, she wrote, I'm willing to give him to you. This is a precious gift. The greatest she could give. This young girl knows what America is all about.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, Invasion of Afghanistan (October 2001)

Girl, Time, Fight

“Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/carl-sagan-science-is-a-way-of-thinking/
Carl Sagan: 'Science Is a Way of Thinking', Science Friday interview from May 1996
27 December 2013

“Affirmative action, rightly understood, would justify a wide variety of outreach programs for those whose lives have been stultified by poverty, broken families, bad schools, and neighborhoods filled with drugs, crime and gangs. One can heartily commend a program for tutoring young blacks, or young whites, who had never had a genuine teacher in a real classroom. One cannot, however, commend a program of raising the grades of young blacks, but not young whites, without having raised their skills. And what possible justification can there be there for giving scholarship assistance to the child of a black middle-class family, while denying it to a poor white? Can one imagine a more crass disregard for the genuine meaning of the Equal Protection Clause? The priests of this new religion of 'affirmative action' are not without material interests. Hundreds of millions of corporate dollars are spent annually on 'sensitivity training'. Within the universities, centers for black, brown and women's (i. e., feminist) studies are being established, with vast amount of patronage bestowed upon them. Traditional courses in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare and the Bible continue to appear in the catalogs, but they are increasingly taught by 'deconstructionists', who have no interest in the texts, but only in subjective reactions to the texts.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Women, School, Family, Religion

“Full-time participant observation over an extended period of time tends to be an age-graded phenomenon. Such studies are most likely to be done by young people, in our student years. When we are established professionals, with teaching or other professional responsibilities, we are unlikely to have the time and the motivation to make such a full commitment.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Learning from the Field, 1984, p. 63

People, Age, Motivation, Study

“In fact, gory horror movies don't rank on the [list of] movies that I like. Good horror movies are great, but I just like good movies. I don't just watch grade Z garbage. That bores me to death.”

Rob Zombie (1965) American singer

[2005-07-20, Carlo Cavagna, Interview: ROB ZOMBIE, 2008-02-01, http://www.aboutfilm.com/features/devilsrejects/zombie.htm]

Death

““I hate students,” [Zizek] said, “they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.
In a recent interview at this year’s Zizek Conference in Ohio, Zizek talked about his personal life before delving into his thoughts on teaching. “I hate giving classes,” Zizek said, citing office hours and grading papers as his two biggest peeves. “I did teach a class here [at the University of Cincinnati] and all of the grading was pure bluff,” he continues. “I even told students at the New School for example… if you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.” He received no papers that semester. But it’s office hours that are the main reason he does not want to teach.
“I can’t imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes there and starts to ask you questions, which is still tolerable. The problem is that here in the United States students tend to be so open that sooner or later, if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions [about] private problems… What should I tell them?”
“I don’t care,” he continued. “Kill yourself. It’s not my problem,””

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

As quoted by Eugene Wolters, " Professor of the Year: 'If You Don't Give Me Any of Your Shitty Papers You Get an A http://www.critical-theory.com/professor-of-the-year-if-you-dont-give-me-any-of-your-shitty-papers-you-get-an-a/'", Critical-Theory.com, May 26 2014; square brackets and lack of accent marks as in orginal

Life, Hate, People, Stupidity

“Muhammad Kasim fixed a tax upon all the subjects, according to the laws of the Prophet. Those who embraced the Muhammadan faith were exempted from slavery, the tribute, and the poll-tax, and from those who did not change their creed a tax was exacted according to three grades. The first grade was of great men, and each of these was to pay silver, equal to forty-eight dirams in weight, the second grade twenty-four dirams, and the lowest grade twelve dirams. It was ordered that all who should become Musulmans at once should be exempted from the payment, but those who were desirous of their old persuasion must pay the tribute and poll-tax. Some showed an inclination to abide by their creed, and some having resolved upon paying tribute, held by the faith of their forefathers, but their lands and property were not taken from them…”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume I, p. 176-182.
Quotes from The Chach Nama

Men, Faith, Law, Change

“This has been a big incident, hasn't in. In reality, James Anderson was a B-grade bowler who got his arse-whipped by Australia that many times it's not even funny. Frankly I don't care what he has to say but at least he has improved his bowling, thank goodness”

Matthew Hayden (1971) Australian cricketer

Quoted on Telegraph.co.uk (October 18, 2012), "Matthew Hayden labels England's James Anderson a 'B-Grade bowler' after dressing-room Ashes fracas" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/9617137/Matthew-Hayden-labels-Englands-James-Anderson-a-B-Grade-bowler-after-dressing-room-Ashes-fracas.html

Reality, Time

“These facts and figures must serve as an eye-opener to the people of Mysore. I refer to them here not because I have any hopes of our reaching the levels of prosperity of the two Colonies, but because it will do us good to know what organization and human endeavour are capable of achieving under favourable conditions. / The nationality of our people rests on a religious and fatalistic basis, not on an economic basis, as in the West. There are still people among us who believe that the golden age was in the past, the world is on the down-grade and the old-word conditions might yet be reproduced some day. The Hindu ideal of life is that this world is a preparation for the next and not a place to stay in and make ourselves comfortable. We are devoted to past ideals, although, out of necessity or from prospect of personal gain, we have partly taken to Western methods of work and business. There is a yearning for the old ideals and a half-hearted acquiescence in the new and, on the whole, the genius of the people is for standing still. / If we are to follow in the wake of other countries in the pursuit of material prosperity, we must give up aimless activities and bring our ideals into line with the standards of the West, namely, to spread education in all grades, multiply occupations and increase production and wealth. All other activities should conform themselves to the economic idea.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

148-149
[Speeches by Sir M. Visvesvaraya, K.C.I.E, https://archive.org/details/VisvesvarayaSpeeches, 1917, Bangalore Government Press, 148]

Life, People, Age, World

“But I respectfully suggest, Major, that the responsibility is slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether to take the nation to war alone, or to take the nation to war part way, or to take the Nation to work half-way. That is a real tough decision.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

To Scott Ritter, in hearings about the disarmament process, before the Senate Committee on Armed Services (September 1998), quoted in * 2020-01-07 Joe Biden, five years before invasion, said the only way of disarming Iraq is "taking Saddam down" Ryan Grim The Intercept https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-history/
1990s

War, Way, Decision, Parting

“Getting a good education and making good grades no longer ensures success, and nobody seems to have noticed, except our children.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Children, Education, Success

“[Written on back of photograph of Ruth and Daniel]
"Ruth Levinson
Third grade teacher.
She believes in me and I can be anything I want when I grow up.
I can even change the world."”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Daniel McCallum, Chapter 28 Ira, p. 335
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

World, Change

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Soul, Motivation, Idea, Question

“The divine in Jesus does not denote a violent rupture of the course of human history with the exclusion of all causal connection and all human personality, but it lies at the basis of all this history from beginning to end; it dwells in it as the divine Logos, as the rational aptitude of human nature, as impulse to the true and good, as God-consciousness. All progress in the development of mankind from the lowest grades upward, every achievement of culture which makes rude nature the servant of reason, every formation of higher ethical ideals, and every clarifying and deepening of the God-consciousness, is an effect and a revelation of the divine Logos dwelling in our race.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 18.

God, History, Nature, Personality

“One thing about school - I always had this attitude that I was in school to learn, and attempted to do whatever was involved in that process, while school had this attitude that I was there to earn grades, which I couldn't care less about. Unsurprisingly, my grades weren't very good.”

Bram Cohen (1975) American programmer, creator of BitTorrent

"Bram Cohen: Creator of BitTorrent" http://wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Articles&pa=showpage&pid=98, WrongPlanet.net, undated; accessed March 9, 2006, 17:01 (UTC)

School, Learning

“Every year right after the Christmas holidays, our IQ scores were posted on the bulletin board at the Academy. We, the juniors and seniors, had taken our tests several weeks ago, and for the last few days we were all nervous wrecks waiting to see our results. Of course, we were all told that what was really crucial for us to get into the college of our choice was the grade point average of our last two years of high school, plus our SAT scores. But we knew that our IQ score could also make a big difference because our IQ, we’d been told, was what gave us a true measure of our intelligence. So if we hadn’t worked real hard in school or hadn’t tested well in our college entrance exams, then our IQ could make all the difference.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School, Intelligence, Waiting, Holiday

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Alexander von Humboldt (6 December 1813) Scanned letter at The Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mtj1&fileName=mtj1page047.db&recNum=74&itemLink=/ammem/mtjhtml/mtjser1.html&linkText=7 Transcript at The Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mtj:@field(DOCID+@lit(tj110127)) 1810s

People, History

“Mythology is wondrous, a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility […]. At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential take of monarchs and battles.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 259; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (1990-10-11)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

School, Soul, History, Problem

“The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Books, Age, Optimism, Knowledge

“Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Whoever believes in Allah and His Apostle, offer prayer perfectly and fasts the month of Ramadan, will rightfully be granted Paradise by Allah, no matter whether he fights in Allah's Cause or remains in the land where he is born." The people said, "O Allah's Apostle! Shall we acquaint the people with the is good news?" He said, "Paradise has one-hundred grades which Allah has reserved for the Mujahidin who fight in His Cause, and the distance between each of two grades is like the distance between the Heaven and the Earth. So, when you ask Allah (for something), ask for Al-firdaus which is the best and highest part of Paradise." (i. e. The sub-narrator added, "I think the Prophet also said, 'Above it (i. e. Al-Firdaus) is the Throne of Beneficent (i. e. Allah), and from it originate the rivers of Paradise."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Sunni Hadith

People, Thinking, Fight, Parting

“The student of culture is concerned with a characteristic which man displays more markedly than any other known creature — the ability to transmit what he has learned. In following the procedure I suggest, the learning of Homo sapiens would be treated as a further specialization of the concept of grades, with the recognition that in some species — possibly even in some orders — the ability to learn may represent not only an improvement, in an evolutionary sense, but also an increase in vulnerability. Man's unique, high ability to learn, coupled as it is with a small amount of built-in behavior, represents such a vulnerability.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 30-31

Behavior, Sense, Learning

“Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall near the refrigerator. The first displayed each kid's grades and major test results since the start of the school year in September. The other was a list of household chores for which each child was responsible. … Some attributed Asian-Americans' success to a conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They tried harder. They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been based — including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented self-denial, and the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be. Ironically, their great success was partly due to the fact that so many born Americans had become cynical about those same ideals.”

Dean Koontz book The Bad Place

Source: The Bad Place (1990), Chapter 32

School, Color, Freedom, Success

“I shook myself; I was dreaming. As I went to bed the words of the eighth-grade class’s teacher, when the class got to Evangeline, kept echoing in my ears: “We’re coming to a long poem now, boys and girls. Now don’t be babies and start counting the pages.” I lay there like a baby, counting the pages over and over, counting the pages.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”, p. 42; conclusion
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Dreams, Girl, Boy, Teachers

“The work itself will cover a wide field including clearance of slums, which for adequate reasons cannot be undertaken by private capital; in rural housing of several kinds, where, again, private capital is unable to function; in rural electrification; in the reforestation of the great watersheds of the Nation; in an intensified program to prevent soil erosion and to reclaim blighted areas; in improving existing road systems and in constructing national highways designed to handle modern traffic; in the elimination of grade crossings; in the extension and enlargement of the successful work of the Civilian Conservation Corps; in non-Federal works, mostly self-liquidating and highly useful to local divisions of Government; and on many other projects which the Nation needs and cannot afford to neglect.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, State of the Union address (1935)

Success, Housing

“The preamble to the Regulation says that women were employed wholesale to entice and take away the wives or female children for purposes of prostitution, and it was common practice among husbands and fathers to desert their families and children. Public conscience there was none, and in the absence of conscience it was futile to expect moral indignation against the social wrongs. Indeed the Brahmins were engaged in defending every wrong for the simple reason that they lived on them. They defended Untouchability which condemned millions to the lot of the helot. They defended caste, they defended female child marriage and they defended enforced widowhood—the two great props of the Caste system. They defended the burning of widows, and they defended the social system of graded inequality with its rule of hypergamy which led the Rajputs to kill in their thousands the daughters that were born to them. What shames! What wrongs! Can such a Society show its face before civilized nations? Can such a society hope to survive?”

Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) Indian scholar, social reformer and author

In support of the Regulation (VII of 1819) to put a stop to this moral degeneracy such were the questions which Ranade asked. He concluded that on only one condition it could be saved—namely, rigorous social reform. Quoted in Ranade Gandhi & Jinnah
At his 100th Anniversary lecture delivered in 1943 on Ranade, Gandhi & Jinnah by Dr. Ambedkar

Women, Marriage, Children, Family

“Much of the skill of the true mathematical physicist and of the mathematical astronomer consists in the power of adapting methods and results carried out on an exact mathematical basis to obtain approximations sufficient for the purposes of physical measurements. It might perhaps be thought that a scheme of Mathematics on a frankly approximative basis would be sufficient for all the practical purposes of application in Physics, Engineering Science, and Astronomy, and no doubt it would be possible to develop, to some extent at least, a species of Mathematics on these lines. Such a system would, however, involve an intolerable awkwardness and prolixity in the statements of results, especially in view of the fact that the degree of approximation necessary for various purposes is very different, and thus that unassigned grades of approximation would have to be provided for. Moreover, the mathematician working on these lines would be cut off from the chief sources of inspiration, the ideals of exactitude and logical rigour, as well as from one of his most indispensable guides to discovery, symmetry, and permanence of mathematical form. The history of the actual movements of mathematical thought through the centuries shows that these ideals are the very life-blood of the science, and warrants the conclusion that a constant striving toward their attainment is an absolutely essential condition of vigorous growth. These ideals have their roots in irresistible impulses and deep-seated needs of the human mind, manifested in its efforts to introduce intelligibility in certain great domains of the world of thought.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), pp. 285-286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 229): Mathematics and Science.

Life, World, History, Intelligence

“God's commandments are not grievous. God put them in the garden, said "You can eat of any tree except that one tree, The Knowledge of Good and Evil." It's real simple, Adam. Enjoy the garden, have lots of kids, and don't learn about evil. […] Parents, don't teach your kids about all the evil things. Don't have drug education classes where you show them, "Hey, this is marijuana. This is how you smoke it. Now don't you do that." Duh. Don't put them in sex ed classes in seventh grade, it's a plumbing class at that time. Don't do that, okay? Let them be ignorant. Let them learn it from mom and dad, not from some heathen, okay? It's real simple Adam. Enjoy the world and have lots of kids and don't learn about evil. Don't learn all that stuff. The Lord said, "Hey, have you eaten off that tree I told you not to eat from?" God is not asking for information. He's asking for a confession. And the man said, "The woman (he passed the buck) whom thou gavest to be with me. Now God, this is really your fault, you know. If you hadn't given her to me I wouldn't have this problem." He said to the woman, "Have you done this?" She said, "Well, the snake that you made…." We still do the same thing, nothing changes, okay? Fear God, keep his commandments. Just like the taking of life is very important in any culture. Murder is serious. Giving life is important. That's why God put certain rules down for reproduction, okay? Follow his rules. "Thou shalt not commit adultery. Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." Don't even look and lust or you've committed adultery already in your heart. By the way, ladies, that's why it's important how you dress, okay? My daddy always said, "If you're not in business, don't advertise."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Women should dress in modest apparel. That's what the Bible says, alright.
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Life, Women, God, World

“The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically “sudden” origins at single bedding planes.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Source: Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), pp. 2–3

Life, Change, Time

“One of the things that characterize my schooling from the early grades on up to university and apparently is still with us because I heard it on the radio this morning, was the idea that all bacteria are bad and that the scientific ideal is a germ free, bacteria free world. Of course, such a world would mean death. And yet, we are actually told now that by 1990 we will have such a sterile world that milk itself being rendered totally sterile, will sit on a table and will never spoil. In such a world not only bacteria will be gone, but man also. Such a world and such a science represents a travesty on God’s creative purpose.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Hybridization and the Law (n. d.)

Death, God, World, School

“I know that when I write, I'm writing for people who can handle high-school math, read at the Grade 12 level, and appreciate subtle humor as opposed to the toilet-bowl kind. I guess that makes the lower cutoff about 17-18 years old.”

Sean Punch (1967) Canadian editor

Steve Jackson Games Forums http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php?p=536888&postcount=3 Answer to the question about which age group GURPS is aimed at

People, School, Reading

“I took some bad acid in November of 1965, and the after effect left me crazy and helpless for six months. My mind would drift into a place that was very electrical and crackly, filled with harsh, abrasive, low grade, cartoony, tawdry carnival visions. There was a nightmarish mechanical aspect to everyday life. My ego was so shattered, so fragmented that it didn't get in the way during what was the most unself-conscious period of my life. I was kind of on automatic pilot and was still constantly drawing. Most of my popular characters—Mr. Natural, Flaky Foont, Angelfood McSpade, Eggs Ackley, The Snoid, The Vulture Demonesses, Av' n' Gar, Shuman the Human, the Truckin' guys, Devil Girl—all suddenly appeared in the drawings in my sketchbook in this period, early 1966. Amazing! I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude. LSD put me somewhere else. I wasn't sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing, I'm not sure. I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 132

Life, Way, Guy, Girl

“There are people who say "I'll never need this math, these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade," or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever again use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Why would-be engineers end up as English majors, May 21, 2011 http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/17/education.stem.graduation/index.html, 2010s

People, School, Problem, Learning

“I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Childhood

Love, Life, Children, School

“I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED!” I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. “Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE—” I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn’t going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I’d go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Jerk, Feeling, Soul, Hell

“Grade-A MEXICAN HONEYBEES $165.95/gallon!
Grade-A EUROPEAN BEES only $220/gallon!
Best quality IRISH EARTHWORMS $67.50/quart!
GUARANTEED live on delivery! Plant Fertility Corp., San Clemente, Calif. (Licensed by California State Board of Agriculture.)”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

February “THE INDISPENSABLE ASSISTANTS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Bee

“In the third grade a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that’s where I belonged.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

Bruce Springsteen Talking

“All that is required to render tho efforts of railroad companies in every respect equal to that of individuals, is a rigid system of personal accountability through every grade of service.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 59. Cited in: Vose (1857: p. 413)

Effort, Personality

“Carpool to save gas. 'Cause I know you're in grade school and driving is like, what you do.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBk37T4u03I
YouTube.com

School

“Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Life, People, Education, Nature

“Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-) [… ] Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second "F" for this term.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1944) Dutch computer scientist

In a Usenet message to Linus Torvalds, 30 Jan 1992 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/625c4a78723eeef5. The "Linux is Obsolete" Debate

“We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad…”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter One
Decline and Fall (1928)

School, Parting

“They put you in your place, and they tell you to behave
But no one can be free until we're all on even grade.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

The Story
Song lyrics

“Multiculturalism is a false euphemism. The real word is "multiracialism", but the word "race" has been recently erased from French legislature, because supposedly there are no races. Here we can observe a new illogicality of the System. There are supposedly no races, but the media are increasingly talking about the rise of racism. How then racists can exist, if there are no races? Nevertheless, we have all too much empirical data showing precisely that multi-ethnic and multicultural countries are prone to ethnic and racial conflicts. What former Yugoslavia went through is in store for the EU - of course, in a different form. One of the additional reasons I left American academia is that I could no longer tolerate giving undeserved passing grades to my American students of African and Hispanic origin, whose IQ and speed of symbolic reasoning were much lower than that of my white American students. It is a form of tyranny of political correctness, much like the former Soviet Union.”

Tomislav Sunić (1953) Croatian-American writer, translator and professor

Interview for hkv.hr https://www.hkv.hr/razgovori/16742-dr-tomislav-sunic-osnovni-problem-hrvatske-je-ostavstina-jugoslavenstva-i-komunizma.html, 15 January 2014

Speed, Falseness, Country

“I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

God Dies (1931)

Happiness, School, Beauty, Way

“As a professional I practice six or seven hours per day, though it depends on my schedule. That's how it is as a musician. It's only when you reach grade five you take them more serious. Until then I saw it as fun. I used to learn them by play pop tunes on the piano. They have harmonies and broken chords and can be used as building blocks to help you with scales.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

The Irish News, 22/01/2005
On Classical Music

Learning, Help, Dependency

“Wild Things is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it. Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wild-things-1998 of Wild Things (20 March 1998) Reviews, Three star reviews

Sex, Way

“We have 6,000 kids every day drop out in this country. And they don't drop out because they're dumb. They drop out because they're bored to death. They're in a 19th century education system in a 21st century world. If we really are serious, then, first of all, we make sure that we build the curriculum around their interests, rather than just push them into something they don't care. Second thing, unleash weapons of mass instruction. I'm a passionate, ardent supporter of having music and art in every school for every student at every grade level.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Republican presidential candidate debate, Johnston, Iowa, 2007-12-12
Republican Debates

Death, World, Education, School

“My grandfather just had a grade-school education. But in that country store he taught me more about equality in the eyes of the Lord than all my professors at Georgetown; more about the intrinsic worth of every individual than all the philosophers at Oxford; and he taught me more about the need for equal justice than all the jurists at Yale Law School.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

"A Place Called Hope" (July 16, 1992)
1990s, A Place Called Hope (16 July 1992)

Education, School, Justice, Law

“This indictment is a kind of fever that flares up from time to time. It flared up after "Defender of the Faith," again after "Goodbye Columbus," and understandably it went way up — to about 107 — after "Portnoy's Complaint." Now there's just a low-grade fever running, nothing to worry about.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

On criticism of his writing, as quoted in "The Unbounded Spirit of Philip Roth" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11/specials/roth-unbounded.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, interview with Mervyn Rothstein, The New York Times (1 August 1985), Late City Final Edition, section C, page 13, column 1

Faith, Way, Understanding, Time

“Needless to deny that the normal London plumber is a dishonest man. We do not even allow ourselves to think so. That question, as to the dishonesty of mankind generally, is one that disturbs us greatly; — whether a man in all grades of life will by degrees train his honesty to suit his own book, so that the course of life which he shall bring himself to regard as soundly honest shall, if known to his neighbours, subject him to their reproof. We own to a doubt whether the honesty of a bishop would shine bright as the morning star to the submissive ladies who now worship him, if the theory of life upon which he lives were understood by them in all its bearings.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

The Plumber (1880)

Life, Books, Star, Question

“I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements.
Of course there wasn’t anybody to send them to, but that didn’t stop the Major. He said with determination: “Nobody’s ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations—even if I have to invent the regulations myself!””

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) American science fiction writer and editor

The Knights of Arthur (p. 394)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Soul, History

“The assumption is all but universal among those who control our educational policies from the elementary grades to the university that anything that sets bounds to the free unfolding of the temperamental proclivities of the young, to their right of self-expression, as one may say, is outworn prejudice. Discipline, so far as it exists, is not of the humanistic or the religious type, but of the kind that one gets in training for a vocation or a specialty. The standards of a genuinely liberal education, as they have been understood, more or less from the time of Aristotle, are being progressively undermined by the utilitarians and the sentimentalists. If the Baconian-Rousseauistic formula is as unsound in certain of its postulates as I myself believe, we are in danger of witnessing in this country one of the great cultural tragedies of the ages.”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "What I Believe" (1930), p. 16

Age, Education, Universe, Time

“In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section I: “The Old Order Changeth”, p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=%22In%20most%20parts%20of%20our%20country%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Men, Way, Business, Time

“I've been fascinated by music for as long as I can remember. I was the kid on the playground in the third grade who would tell other kids about Paul Simon or Depeche Mode.”

Josh Groban (1981) American musician and actor

Kansas City Star, 08/16/04

Music

“You can't press a button to make Phil Mitchell jump over a turtle and land on a cloud (unless you've recently ingested a load of military-grade hallucinogens, in which case you can also make him climb inside his own face and start whistling colours).”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 20 November 2006, Reality bytes back http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1952430,00.html On video games Guardian columns

“A child now entering first grade has never known a world without the Web; I want you, just for a moment, to try to imagine a world without the telephone, without electricity. It’s difficult to do, because both of these technologies are entirely commonplace, woven into the fabric of our culture so intensely it becomes nearly impossible to imagine a time before they existed. As electricity is for us, the Web will be for our children; an invisible field of knowledge that surrounds them, and infuses the entire world with instant answers to their requests. Within a generation, it won’t be important how much you can remember; that will have been replaced by how agile you are at acquiring the facts you need.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

Toys and the Playful World http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/WIT.html

Children, World, Imagination, Knowledge

“Siphonophores do not convey the message—a favorite theme of unthinking romanticism—that nature is but one gigantic whole, all its parts intimately connected and interacting in some higher, ineffable harmony. Nature revels in boundaries and distinctions; we inhabit a universe of structure. But since our universe of structure has evolved historically, it must present us with fuzzy boundaries, where one kind of thing grades into another.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"A Most Ingenious Paradox", p. 95
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Nature, Universe, Parting

“The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby … I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don’t remember the first time I saw him.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://aspecialthing.com/forum/f42/flashback-06-louis-c-k-interview-14987/ (2006)

Love, Time, Night

“One spring day in my sixth grade … we read two articles. The first concerned the cruelty toward cattle in slaughterhouses and the second was about the detrimental effects of red meat on your body. By the time I got home later that day, I had resolved to give up red meat, to take a stand against animal cruelty and a stand for my health … At 13, I decided to give up all meat and fish. My parents were even more surprised and cautiously supportive – provided I learned how to get enough protein. … Although I now eat meat (after having not for 18 years), I have tremendous respect for people who make consistent ethical choices in their lives – people who not only don’t eat meat, but who also don’t wear fur or leather and don’t use products made from animal derivatives.”

Chelsea Clinton (1980) daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton

"On Assignment: Chelsea Clinton admires vegetarian stands taken by Stella, Linda McCartney" http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/19/19026302-on-assignment-chelsea-clinton-admires-vegetarian-stands-taken-by-stella-linda-mccartney?lite, Rock Center NBC News (20 June 2013).

People, Health, Home, Spring

“1st grade: Mastered.
2nd Grade: MAstered.
3rd Grade: Mastered.
4th Grade: Heres when they start trying to trick you
5th Grade:This ones hard”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/764864532720279552] Tweets by year, 2016

“All I knew was that I’d flunked the third grade twice because I couldn’t learn to read, had a terrible time all through grammar school and high school. Then after ten years of writing, I was finally able to sell my first book to a leading mass-market paperback publisher in New York.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Books, School, Learning, Time

“In Professor Pigou's study the argument that free enterprise lead to excessive investments in industry having relatively upward-sloping cost curves is developed with the aid of concrete example, the case of two roads; Suppose that between two points there are two highways, one of which is broad enough to accommodate without crowding all the traffic which may care to use it, but is poorly graded and surfaced; while the other is a much better road, but narrow and quite limited in capacity. If a large number of trucks operate between the two termini and are free to choose either of the two routes, they will tend to distribute themselves between the roads in such proportions that the cost per unit of transportation, or effective returns per unit of investment, will be the same for every truck on both routes. As more trucks use the narrower and better road, congestion develops, until at a certain point it becomes equally profitable to use the broader but poorer highway.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: The Ethics of Competition, 1935, p. 211

Study

“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"
And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood — that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the Whites Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze.
1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)

Happiness, Books, World, School

“You have the charisma of a damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk. And the question that I want to ask, […] that we're all going to ask, is "Who are you?" I'd never heard of you. Nobody in Europe had ever heard of you. I would like to ask you, President, who voted for you, and what mechanism … oh, I know democracy's not popular with you lot, and what mechanism do the people of Europe have to remove you? Is this European democracy? Well, I sense, I sense though that you are competent and capable and dangerous, and I have no doubt in your intention, to be the quiet assassin of European democracy, and of the European nation states. You appear to have a loathing for the very concept of the existence of nation states - perhaps that's because you come from Belgium, which of course is pretty much a non-country. But since you took over, we've seen Greece reduced to nothing more than a protectorate. Sir, you have no legitimacy in this job at all, and I can say with confidence that I speak on behalf of the majority of British people in saying: We don't know you, we don't want you, and the sooner you're put out to grass, the better.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Speech in the European Parliament, 24 February 2010 - Ukip's Nigel Farage tells Van Rompuy: You have the charisma of a damp rag http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/25/nigel-farage-herman-van-rompuy-damp-rag, The Guardian, 24 February 2010. 2010

People, Democracy, Confidence, Question

“The rain, the rain, the rain. You can't even hear it outside the window but still it's a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flower, and so many grade school teachers are single.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Frigidly

Sadness, School, Flowers, Tree

“SPAN ID=We_live_in>We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. […] One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life.

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Pooling of Knowledge, p. 14

Life, Wealth

“What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Victory Begins at Home (20 January 2004)

Religion, Guy, Birth

“Before it exploded one night, I went to a four grade, two room schoolhouse and we had textbooks from the 1940s.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[9690va$mjc$1@panix3.panix.com, 2001]
2000s

Night

“When I was in eighth grade there was a movie called Willard, about a rat, and I fell in love with rats. I wanted one … so one guy suggested that I call Hershey Medical Center … So I called and they said … "What experiment is it for?" I said, "I don't wanna experiment on it, I just want it for a pet!" And they said, "Well, we can't do that." … About two weeks later, I go out to the mailbox, and there's this thing from the [American Anti-Vivisection Society]. Lo and behold, I'm looking through all these different experiments and I see a rat there, spread wide open, and it said some of the experiments [were] done at Hershey med center. So boom! I put two and two together, and I decided to do a report in school about it. I took advanced bio and you had to dissect cats, and I started [asking] questions, "Where'd the cat come from?", and that really ruffled some feathers. "I'm not gonna do this, you know." So basically I got thrown out of advanced bio. From that point on I became an antivivisectionist. … [Things] are changing. When I went vegetarian it was really hard on the road, and that was just eight years ago. And I see people doing it twenty, twenty-five years, traveling, and it's like, wow! … I think on a very basic level people wanna do the right thing. And if we continue to focus on that part of them that wants to do the right thing, we can win maybe at the next generation or the one after that.”

Rikki Rockett (1961) American musician

"Something To Believe In" https://books.google.it/books?id=NWxF_V4r3PAC&pg=PA107, interview by Kirsten Rosenberg (July 1999), in Speaking Out for Animals, edited by Kim W. Stallwood, Lantern Books, 2001, pp. 107-112.

Love, People, School, Travel

“In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

pg 486
The City in History (1961)

People, Age, Food, Communication

“Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

Source: 1990s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), p. 1

Past

“Sadiq Khan’s latest outburst that President Trump is ‘not welcome’ in London is well beyond his pay grade and flies in the face of common courtesy. It is also hypocritical: he is willing to host the ambassadors of countries which have a travel ban on Israeli citizens at a reception at City Hall, but hurls insults at President Trump who has highlighted the horrors of Islamism and wants to protect his own citizens from violent jihadis. His so-called drive to be ‘inclusive’ is a sham. He has snubbed the democratically elected President of the United States and the American people who voted for him, and London will be worse off for the continuing deterioration of his tone.”

David Kurten (1971) British politician

‘Not Welcome’: London’s Muslim Mayor Repeats Calls to Cancel Trump Visit http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/12/26/not-welcome-londons-muslim-mayor-repeats-calls-cancel-trump-visit/ (December 26, 2017)

People, Travel, Country

“If you ask adults how many teachers — out of the scores in elementary, middle school, high school, college and graduate school — made a singular impression on who and what they are, it's never more than three or four teachers. Everybody else is a distant second to this set.When we finally create a cloning machine, we should clone those teachers. Maybe that's 100 years from now, but that's at the top of my list. Until that happens, the educational system has not fully understood the causes and effects of achievement and success in life. There remains a culture that equates high grades with success in school and correlates success in school with success in life. That mentality is so deep within us that it may be inextricable from our behavior.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)

Life, Education, School, Behavior

“I recommend that you provide the resources to carry forward, with full vigor, the great health and education programs that you enacted into law last year. I recommend that we prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty. I recommend that you give a new and daring direction to our foreign aid program, designed to make a maximum attack on hunger and disease and ignorance in those countries that are determined to help themselves, and to help those nations that are trying to control population growth. I recommend that you make it possible to expand trade between the United States and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I recommend to you a program to rebuild completely, on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of several of our cities in America. I recommend that you attack the wasteful and degrading poisoning of our rivers, and, as the cornerstone of this effort, clean completely entire large river basins. I recommend that you meet the growing menace of crime in the streets by building up law enforcement and by revitalizing the entire federal system from prevention to probation. I recommend that you take additional steps to insure equal justice to all of our people by effectively enforcing nondiscrimination in federal and state jury selection, by making it a serious federal crime to obstruct public and private efforts to secure civil rights, and by outlawing discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. I recommend that you help me modernize and streamline the federal government by creating a new Cabinet-level Department of Transportation and reorganizing several existing agencies. In turn, I will restructure our civil service in the top grades so that men and women can easily be assigned to jobs where they are most needed, and ability will be both required as well as rewarded. I will ask you to make it possible for members of the House of Representatives to work more effectively in the service of the nation through a constitutional amendment extending the term of a Congressman to four years, concurrent with that of the President. Because of Vietnam we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked in order to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. Last year alone the wealth that we produced increased $47 billion, and it will soar again this year to a total over $720 billion. Because our economic policies have produced rising revenues, if you approve every program that I recommend tonight, our total budget deficit will be one of the lowest in many years. It will be only $1.8 billion next year. Total spending in the administrative budget will be $112.8 billion. Revenues next year will be $111 billion. On a cash basis—which is the way that you and I keep our family budget—the federal budget next year will actually show a surplus. That is to say, if we include all the money that your government will take in and all the money that your government will spend, your government next year will collect one-half billion dollars more than it will spend in the year 1967. I have not come here tonight to ask for pleasant luxuries or for idle pleasures. I have come here to recommend that you, the representatives of the richest nation on earth, you, the elected servants of a people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe, you bring the most urgent decencies of life to all of your fellow Americans.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Women, Men, Money

“We all know India has a huge competitive advantage -- we have the largest arable land, focused sunshine, sensible utilisation of water in 30% of land. The question is what should we do to make the US market -- the most difficult market in the world -- accept our produce. For that, we need traceability. It is a simple technology, which we are giving the farmers. It needs certification and verification processes -- to us it is like a process plant. You can then get the output, sort it and grade it.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on retail and SEZ plans

World, Question, Water

“They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Coffee

“The teacher asked us to write an essay based on an artist's visual version of the cold and other hardships endured by Washington's men at Valley Forge. I dashed off a page or so of commentary, which brought from the teacher public commendation for my historical empathy and perception. This juvenile effort may have influenced my instructor when he gave me a grade on my report card of 100 percent in history. I thought then, and still think, that no pupil is worth 100 percent in history.”

Thomas A. Bailey (1902–1983) American historian

The American Pageant Revisited, p. 9

Men, History, Thinking, Effort

“In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

Pain, Chance

“Either I had to get my admission in grade ninth again or else I had to do some work-around to seek for a ‘jugaad’ (hack). I chose the latter.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

Gone are the Days (2016)

“In 7th grade, I saw the Allman Brothers play at the Beacon Theatre. I also saw the Dave Mathews Band perform at Giant’s Stadium. Those concerts changed my life. I was inspired so much. In my heart, I knew that was the only thing I wanted to do with my life.”

Ross Mintzer (1987) American musician and performer

Interview with Arts Brooksfield(16 October 2014) https://www.facebook.com/artsBrookfield/photos/a.100993377692.102500.97825917692/10152291198457693/ 2014

Life, Change, Heart

“Miss Havisham had told me about Generics. They were created here in the Well to populate the books that were to be written. At the point of creation they were simply a human canvas without paint - blank like a coin, ready to be stamped with individualism. They had no history, no conflicts, no foibles - nothing that might make them either readable or interesting in any way. It was up to various institutions to teach them to be useful members of fiction. They were graded, too. A to D, one through ten. Any that were D-graded were like worker bees in crowds and busy streets. Small speaking parts were C-grades; B-grades usually made up the bulk of featured but not leading characters. These parts usually -but not always- went to the A-grades, handpicked for their skills at character projection and multidimensionality.”

Jasper Fforde book The Well of Lost Plots

The Well of Lost Plots (2003), ch.1, p. 11

Books, Way, History, Business

“Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind.”

Francis Bacon book Novum Organum

Aphorism 129
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.

“The number of American presidential candidates varies with the sunspot cycle and the phases of the moon. Being a Republican, I'm backing Hillary Clinton. Because she could lose. The reason is not that she's a woman. The reason is that she's the particular woman who taught the 4th grade class that every man in America wished he were dead in. Hillary Clinton is Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Hillary Clinton is 'America's ex-wife.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

"Letter to Our European Friends" (4 February 2008)

Football, Dead

“We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too.

Reading

“This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade.”

Harlan Ellison book The Deathbird

"The Deathbird" (1974) First lines.
Context: This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade. Hints: remember, in chess, kings cancel each other out and cannot occupy adjacent squares, are therefore all-powerful and totally powerless, cannot affect each other, produce stalemate. Hinduism is a polytheistic religion; the sect of Atman worships the divine spark of life within Man; in effect saying, "Thou art God." Provisos of equal time are not served by one viewpoint having media access to two hundred million people in prime time while opposing viewpoints are provided with a soapbox on the corner. Not everyone tells the truth. Operational note: these sections may be taken out of numerical sequence: rearrange to suit yourself for optimum clarity. Turn over your test papers and begin.

Quotes about grade page 2

Quotes about grade
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