INSPIRING ALLIES AND TEACHERS
Michael Polanyi:
Personal knowledge in science is not made but discovered, and as such, it claims to establish contact with reality beyond the clues on which it relies.
It commits us, passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality . . . like love, to which it is akin, this commitment is a “shirt of flame” blazing with passion and, also like love, consumed by devotion to a universal demand.
Such is the true sense of objectivity in science. Intellectual commitment is a responsible decision, in submission to the compelling claims of what in good conscience I conceive to be true.
Wendell Johnson:
The scientific method simply requires that we maintain an honest relationship between conclusions and data. It is the only pattern I know about in which the individual becomes free, by definition, to work out his own conclusions on the basis of his own data. As I see it, the scientific method in that sense is related to everything that somehow centers around the integrity and dignity of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson:
I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD ALMIGHTY ETERNAL HOSTILITY AGAINST EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN.
S. I. Hayakawa:
In order to describe what is going on today, let me suggest an analogy. Suppose from the time that your children are old enough to sit up, they are snatched away from you for three or four or more hours a day by a powerful sorcerer. This sorcerer is a story-teller and a spinner of dreams. He plays enchanting music; he is an unfailingly entertaining companion. He makes the children laugh, he is constantly suggesting good thing to eat and wonderful toys for their parents to buy them. . . . All happiness, all significance, all values that human beings might strive for are translated by advertising into purchasable commodities.
John Kenneth Galbraith:
“The emancipation of belief requires presumption against all persuasion. Such persuasion exists to impose the goals of the technostructure on the individual. The individual who wishes to be free cannot, therefore, accede. He must resist.”
Neil Postman:
Big Brother is not watching us; we are watching him.
Aldous Huxley:
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and these great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism, and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious and political idols. But zeal, dogmatism, and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge . . . indulging instead in oversimplification, overgeneralization, and over-abstraction.
Albert Einstein:
Life in the habit of war corrupted the normal desire of the human heart, and as a result the effect of every humane and sane act is lost. An act of this kind only arouses suspicions and raises the anger of people who see it as a manifestation of betrayal of the homeland.
Erik Erikson:
The child develops indoctrinated with the conviction that his “species” alone was planned by an all-wise deity, created in a special cosmic event, and appointed by history to guard the only genuine version of humanity. . . . Thus “pseudo-species” are created who bind their members into a pattern of individual and collective identity, but alas, reinforce that pattern by a mental fear of and a murderous hatred for other pseudo-species. . . . Man possessed by this combination of lethal weaponry, moral hypocrisy and identity panic is not only apt to lose all sense of species but also to turn on another subgroup with a ferocity generally alien to the “social” animal world.
Albert Einstein:
If my General Theory of Relativity is proved mistaken, the French will consider me a German and the Germans consider me a Jew. If my theory is proven correct, the Germans will consider me a German and the French—a Citizen of the World.
Carl Rogers:
Authoritarian rule is the accepted policy in the classroom. Democracy and its values are ignored and scorned in practice.
Erich Fromm:
The famous statement at the end of The Communist Manifesto that the workers “have nothing to lose but their chains” contains a profound psychological error. With their chains they have also to lose all those irrational needs and satisfactions which were originated while they were wearing the chains.
Martin Buber:
The fundamental fact of human existence is neither the individual as such nor the aggregate as such. Each considered by itself is a mighty abstraction. The individual is a fact of existence insofar as he steps into living relation with other individuals. The aggregate is a fact of existence insofar as it is built up of living units of relation. The fundamental fact of human existence is man with man.
Wikipedia:
Deliberative democracy holds that, for a democratic decision to be legitimate, it must be preceded by authentic deliberation, not merely the aggregation of preferences that occurs in voting. Authentic deliberation is deliberation among decision-makers that is free from distortions of unequal political power, such as power a decision-maker obtains through economic wealth or the support of interest groups.
Martin Buber:
That peoples can no longer carry on authentic dialogue with one another is not only the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time, it is also that which most urgently makes a demand on us. I believe, despite all, that the peoples in our hour can enter into dialogue with one another. In a genuine dialogue each of the partners, even when he stands in opposition to the other, heeds, affirms, and confirms his opponent as an existing other. Only so can conflict certainly not be eliminated from the world, but be humanly arbitrated and led toward its overcoming.
Coretta Scott King:
As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder.
Carl Rogers:
Psychology can be very subversive when it enters the arena of power-politics.
Bertrand Russel:
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. It is only by realizing that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted. . . . Equal cooperation is much more difficult than despotism, and much less in line with instinct.
Betty Doer and Vicki Legion:
The women’s movement experience pushed us into some fruitful struggling against our competitive upbringing, but the old ways are hard dying. Correct-lining, snap judgments and labeling make us lose the exploration of real differences in a haze of rhetoric, personal attack and counterattack. When we’re preoccupied with our fear of being labeled, our ability to think critically gets suspended.
Right\wrong thinking impedes critical thinking and creativity. I am sad at how often I have seen this dynamic play itself out in discussions. Marx, or Third World revolutionaries, or the Panthers or some other authority is defined as “Right.” Anyone who questions what the authority says is at best “wrong” and at worst “counterrevolutionary.” The discussion degenerates into a biblical exegesis, with different sides swapping quotes and impressions. Facts and experiences that don’t fit “the line” are ignored. Real differences are obscured in barrages of rhetoric, while new events are jammed into old categories. So much for our ability to respond creatively to changing conditions. "Liberation", 1974
Carl Rogers:
I don’t know how to solve the problems of the exploitation of the poor by the rich, not the horror of nuclear shadow, nor the incredible social injustices of the world. I devoutly wish I did. But if we can discover one truth about the process of building community, I’m not going to despair. The discovery of anything that is approximately true has an earthshaking revolutionary power.
Lewis Mumford:
In their impatience, in their despair, people secretly long to cast the burden of their own regeneration upon a savior: a president, a pope, a dictator—vulgar counterparts of a divinity debased or a corruption deified. But such a leader is only the mass of humanity writ small: the incarnation of our resentments, hates, sadisms, or our own cowardices, confusions, and complacencies.
Tom Atlee:
I had learned from my experience in the Great Peace March that the healthy living system can and will solve its own problems if it can just organize itself in a way that allows that.
Richard Bach as Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
Why is it, that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard? --- Jonathan Livingston Seagull
