You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.
Josephine BakerRead
You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Education is essential for self-protection and empowerment, advocating for knowledge over violence.
In this quote, Josephine Baker emphasizes the critical importance of education as a means of self-defense and empowerment. She advocates for the power of knowledge and communication—instead of resorting to violence—as a way to navigate the world, urging individuals to acquire skills and wisdom from their educational pursuits to better protect themselves and society.
Themes
EducationSelf-ProtectionKnowledgeEmpowermentNon-Violence
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used as a motivational speech opener at a school assembly.
More from Josephine Baker
All quotes →I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.
Josephine BakerRead
Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.
Josephine BakerRead
I did take the blows [of life], but I took them with my chin up, in dignity, because I so profoundly love and respect humanity.
Josephine BakerRead
I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more.
Josephine BakerRead
Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.
Josephine BakerRead
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I dream for a world which is free of child labour, a world in which every child goes to school. A world in which every child gets his rights.
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The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.
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Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.
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Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we've all made.
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What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face--they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that.
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
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