Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
VoltaireRead
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Interpretation
Books can be dull, but they rarely cause harm.
In this quote, Voltaire suggests that while many books may fail to engage or excite their readers, the act of reading itself is not detrimental. He emphasizes that literature, no matter how boring, does not possess the capacity to inflict real harm, contrasting the passive experience of reading with the potential consequences of other human actions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of reading and education.
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
The unfinished character of human beings and the transformational character of reality necessitate that education be an ongoing activity.
I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.
In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power.
There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.
I think it's a mistake to think, 'Am I going to write a young adult book, or do I desperately want to write a book for adults?' I think the better ambition is to try to write someone's favorite book, because those categorizations of adult, young adult, become kind of superfluous.
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
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