“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
W.B. Yeats
LATER: An email from Barry McMullin tells me that it’s probably a misattribution. It’s not clear that Yeats ever said it, and if he did he was paraphrasing Plutarch:
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.”
Which suggests where Amazon got the name for its eReader.
“Movies are for entertainment. Western Union is for messages.”
Jack Warner
Nice quote from Krugman.
Catherine Rampell comments skeptically on Peter Orszag’s call for delegating more policy to panels of nonpolitical experts. I’d add that this is an odd time to make such a proposal. Yes, the political world is deeply dysfunctional — but what’s equally remarkable is just how terrible the judgment of the supposed experts has been. It’s not just the complete failure to foresee this crisis. Fancy international organizations have been persistently offering disastrous advice, counseling austerity and interest rate hikes just as the recovery, such as it is, stumbles. Politicians say dumb things about monetary policy — but so does the ECB.
The point is that what we need are the right ideas, not the right sort of people. Madmen in authority come in all forms, and the dignified men in suits are often no better than the rabble-rousers.
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”.
Winston Churchill
(Attn: Liberal Democrats)
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Leon Tolstoy – 1897
“Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
Vint Cerf
Now that the Liberal Democrats are more assertively opposed, I cannot see how the Coalition can stand aside and let the BSkyB deal go ahead. But the potential significance of what has happened is bigger than one deal, and can be conveyed in a single question: If there were an election tomorrow which party leaders would want the endorsement of Rebekah Brooks? A week ago they would have died for it.
Steve Richards, writing in today’s Independent.
“Without data, you are just another person with an opinion …”
Reminds me of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s remark that “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts”.
“My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”
The US president to crowds in Dublin’s College Green
[Source: The Irish Times – Sat, May 28, 2011.]
“I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
Mark Twain