Let’s Get People Talking and Thinking

Religion.rantrave.com ^ | May 29, 2015 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Here is a list of great quotes left by Anonymous on a major forum. Use them to start discussions at school and elsewhere.

Some of these quotes are scarily appropriate to our present situation in Obama's America. Others show how our founding fathers were thinking 200 years ago.

What our public schools now call Critical Thinking is usually neither critical nor thinking. It's blind acceptance of politically correct opinions.

Debate. Argue. Discuss. Finally, figure out answers for yourself.

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"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." – Aldous Huxley

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." – James Madison

"A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both." – James Madison

"The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people. It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. Light and liberty go together. I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man. Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity." – Thomas Jefferson

"Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny." - Aristotle

"Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us." ¯ Thomas Paine, Common Sense

"He who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature." – Aristotle

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - ¯ Woodrow Wilson [More than 100 years ago, while he was the president of Princeton University, liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson lays out candidly what is still the objective of our Education Establishment today.]

"Youth belongs to us and we will yield them to no one." - Joseph Goebbels

"The whole education in a national state must aim first of all not at stuffing the student with mere knowledge but by building bodies which are healthy to the core." – Adolf Hitler

"That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." H.L. Mencken

"With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — 'child hero' was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police." – George Orwell 1984

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." - ¯ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

NOTE: "Anonymous" is a person registered on this "major forum" but not under his real name. The material was shared with me privately. I thought that lots of people would enjoy seeing it.

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[a fool in paradise]

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." – Aldous Huxley

The application of the lessons of history is the core issue.

The Left doesn't see a problem (morally, ethically, or fiscally) with Marxism, Communism, Socialism... they believe that the problems arose from compromise and challenges from critics. Therefore rather than abandon the discredited politically ideology, they seek to eradicate/silence the critics.