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"Is it possible that literacy standards are falling because young Australians are growing up in a culture in which they can be entertained and informed, and in which they can communicate effectively, without having to master any but the most rudimentary literacy skills?"
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"Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Pagans earn their reputations for relaxed sexual mores, often in rebellion from the repression of their religions during adolescence. At a Pagan festival, one need only lower one's guard to be offered sex under the cloaking of the sacred."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Sociologically speaking, as Americans we often lack social, cultural, and mindful awareness. We hear the stories of how our arrogance has been known to offend, confuse, and alienate people from other cultures. Arrogance is the thief of mindfulness and it happens from both directions."
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Personal Development
"The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men."
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Personal Development
"The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance."
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Personal Development
"A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful."
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Personal Development
"In Shinear, a woman [is] safe anywhere, any time-except from Trollocs and Myrddraal, of course-and any man [will] die to see it so."
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Personal Development
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born."
Author Name
Personal Development
Explore more quotes by Hugh Mackay
"No one welcomes chaos, but why crave stability and predictability?"
Chaos
"I suspect the secret of personal attraction is locked up in our unique imperfections, flaws and frailties."
Flaws
"But the rule seems to be that the bigger and more life-changing the decision, the less it will seem like a decision at all."
Life
"Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives."
People
"Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people."
People
"One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives."
Change
"Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational."
Life
"Although we love the idea of choice - our culture almost worships it - we seek refuge in the familiar and the comfortable."
Love
"Reading is a huge effort for many people, a bore for others, and, believe it or not, many people prefer watching TV."
People
"Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account."
Children
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