Richard Mitchell Quotations

We decided if they would let us march, we wouldn't overly confront them.

Green was shooting 3s left and right. Coach told me to guard him real tight. It was all desire and toughness. Our team has no superstars, but we have heart.

Literacy is not, as it is considered in our schools, a PORTION of education. It IS education. It is at once the ability AND the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and out of knowledge and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values or emotional responses, however worthy, to make judgments.

We had to take it inside. The first half, we were all shooting up 3s and they weren't going in.

We're working on a positive leaflet to give to adults, but nothing grim.

There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified educations is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An education that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must teach by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.

There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified educations is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An education that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must teach by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.

We have a 15-year contractual agreement that was negotiated with Interface in 2001, ... I think the agreement was signed in January of 2002.

A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. Themeditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouthutters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are thesame. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become themeditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of ourunderstanding.

It's going to turn the land into a marsh for the people who live on the end of the street touching the river. We already get wetter than what other parts of the county are used to, but once you start building and moving all that dirt around I can only assume its going to impact those houses.

I never even worked on (computers) out on the streets -- never even been on the Internet, ... I didn't even know how to turn them on.

If you actually drive up and down 44th Avenue you'll see more eagles nests. This area used to be rural.

Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.

A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.

Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.

The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.

Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact.

If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely--provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your mind.

Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education.

If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.

An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.

Who speaks reason to his fellow man bestows it upon them.

There is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words.

You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.

Education, I am convinced, must be nothing more than this: The journey toward the limits of Reason, if any there be.

Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.

A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe in which responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is IMMORAL.

If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.

In a government institution, there is only one area in which problems are taken seriously, and that is the political. Many of the strange things done in American educationism suddenly become perfectly understandable when we see them not as educational methods but as political maneuvers. We must understand illiteracy, therefore, the root of ignorance and thoughtlessness, as not some inadvertent failure to accomplish what was intended but simply a political arrangement of great value to somebody.

There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education.

We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.

When we find ourselves wondering about the meaning of conditions and events, its always useful to ask, who profits?

Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.

If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave.

His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.

People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.

Training is a good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend, and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all.

Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.