Training Quotes (page 28)
...to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.(writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury)
H. L. Mencken
You have been so careful of me that I never had a child's heart. You have trained me so well that I never dreamed a child's dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, Father , from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child's belief or a child's fear. Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to it. " My dear Louisa," said he, you abundantly repay my care. Kiss me, my dear girl.
Charles Dickens
You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn’t of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that’s not your business. They should’ve trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.
John Steinbeck
Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His...
Paul Goodman
What he called the 'homely' was the natural food both of his heart and his imagination. A bright hearth seen through an open door as we passed, a train of ducks following a brawny farmer's wife, a drill of cabbages, in a suburban garden - these were things that never failed to move him, even to an ecstasy, and he never found them incompatible with his admiration for Proust, or Wyndham Lewis, or Picasso.
C. S. Lewis