The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.
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Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that read more
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.
Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. One read more
Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. One often obtains a clue to a person's nature by discovering the reasons for his or her imperviousness to certain impressions.
The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, read more
The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass- which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught- but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse. The academic backwoodsmen have been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Darwin and Freud; they stretch, a solid and hostile phalanx of pedantic mediocrities, across the centuries.
...brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value.
...brainpower is the scarcest commodity and the only one of real value.
There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured.
There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured.
Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact. Many grown-ups will obstinately persist, read more
Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact. Many grown-ups will obstinately persist, if only now and then, in composing small strings of sentences in their heads and achieving at least momentary logic. This probably cannot be prevented, but we have learned how to minimize the consequences by arranging that such grown-ups will be unable to pursue that logic very far. If they were at home in the technology of writing, there's no telling how much social disorder they would cause by thinking things out at length.Our schools have chosen to cut this danger off as close to the root as possible, thus taking measures to preclude not only the birth of thought but its conception. They give the pill to even the youngest children, but just to be on the safe side, they give it to everybody else, too, especially all would-be schoolteachers.
There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind...
There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind...
