It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the discomfort that challenging ideas can bring, leading people to suppress knowledge that threatens their beliefs.
Ursula K. Le Guin's quote suggests that books or ideas that provoke thought and challenge existing beliefs are often seen as dangerous. Those who are unwilling to question their own assumptions may resort to censorship or banning such works rather than confronting uncomfortable truths, revealing a tendency to cling to familiar ideologies at the cost of potential growth and understanding.
In practice
In a discussion about freedom of speech at a book club meeting.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.
Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don't drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
You are at some point exposed to a wonderful story, and you really want to know what happens next, so you learn to read in order to find out.
To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.