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"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."
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Exlpore more Education quotes
"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."
"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."
"Frivolity is inborn, conceit acquired by education."
"Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."
"If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"
"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."
"Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems."
Explore more quotes by Doris Lessing
"There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful."
"Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship."
"I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to their flat at all: that the ties between Nelson and his wife are bitterly close, and never to be broken in their lives. They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.Nelson is about to leave his wife; he will never leave her. She will wail at being rejected and abandoned; she does not know she will never be rejected."
"You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so."
"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this."
"The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."
"Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing."
"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how."
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