There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
Our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.
If remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor—something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes pos...
The modern idea of testing a reader's comprehension, as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehend...
That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.
The world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consist...
We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.
We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words,...
The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales,
Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.
Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an große Erzählungen – Erzählungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklärungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukun...
Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is dem...
All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.
What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wr...
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For L...
In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must draw them pictures so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without picture...
Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine...
The world of the known and the not yet known is bridged by wonderment. But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child’s world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek...