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“Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.”
― Frank Zappa

“We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
― Ken Robinson

“One is punished most for one’s virtues.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang up them.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.

In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.

Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.

This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.

The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance �� and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ �� the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.”
― Christopher Langan

“Something once lost can never return.”
― Ciel Phantomhive

“We live in a highly complex, technological world �� and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.”
― Christopher Langan

“Everything has a price. The price, however, isn't always money.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“Now, where are [Mexican illegal immigrants] fleeing from? Mostly from Central America, where they’re fleeing from the results of our policies.”
― Noam Chomsky

“There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.”
― Harold Bloom

“The only difference between fiction and religion is that people don't kill themselves over fiction.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“All too often, when we love somebody, we don't accept him or her as what the person effectively is. We accept him or her insofar as this person fits the co-ordinates of our fantasy. We misidentify [...] him or her �� which is why, when we discover that we were wrong, love can quickly turn into violence.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The anti-life of [Jerry Falwell] proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.”
― Thomas Piketty

“For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.”
― Anthony Esolen

“Having sex with a condom is like eating chocolate with the wrap on.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“people always let you down. It was just part of the human condition. Look at Kat and Callie. One had tried to kill me; the other had almost gotten me killed. Neither intentionally, but did it matter? My mother never meant to hurt me and she'd all but ruined my life. It didn't matter what people meant, it mattered what they did.”
― Christina Garner, Gateway

“Dr. Urbino replied without looking at her: “I did not know that fellow was a poet.�� And then he wiped him from his memory, because among other things, his profession had accustomed him to the ethical management of forgetfulness.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“I call [fourth-wave feminism] fainting–couch feminism, a la the delicate Victorian ladies who retreated to an elegant chaise when overcome with emotion. As an equality feminist from the 1970s, I am dismayed by this new craze. Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can’t cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism—and for women.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers

“It's ironic how your comfort zone can be tiring sometimes.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“В первые годы, когда я еще их не знала, они бывали во французских литературных кругах, встречались с людьми своего поколения (сходившего во Франции на нет), с Ренье, с Бурже, с Франсом.
�� Потом мы им всем надоели, �� говорил Дмитрий Сергеевич, �� и они нас перестали приглашать.
�� Потому что ты так бестактно ругал большевиков, �� говорила она своим капризным скрипучим голосом, �� а им всегда так хотелось их любить.
�� Да, я лез к ним со своими жалобами и пхохочествами (он картавил), а им хотелось совсем другого: они находили, что русская революция ужасно интересный опыт, в экзотической стране, и их не касается. И что, как сказал Ллойд Джордж, торговать можно и с каннибалами.”
― Нина Берберова, Italics are Mine

“I am...only a small part of history and the legacy of mankind's fall from grace.
- Danny Rollings”
― James Fox, Killer on Campus

“Somewhere along the way we all lost humanity, so we also lost the right to call ourselves humans. Time will show us what should call ourselves, I don't think it will be positive.”
― Rob Al'dred

“Šta je meni trebalo stablo spoznanja? Volio bih znojiti se za očevim plugom nego brodit sa Akilom pred Troju ili uzvitlati prah junaka Igora. Buditi znanjem želje u sebi a ne dovit se činu, letiti se mišlju preko mora, preko zvijezda, a tijelom biti prikovan do groba na jedno mjesto, to je prokletstvo. Blaženi slaba uma ljudi!”
― August Šenoa

“As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.

If they make it that far.”
― Candy Schulman

“Sex sells, but gay sex sells better.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“A world where parents die and brothers die and nothing stops to respect that fact. The whole universe just goes and goes as if nothing has happened...”
― Colleen Hoover, This Girl

“А потом наступила Римская империя. Войны, кризисы, убийства и безнадежие �� Август, Тиберий, Нерон, Христос и христианство, �� город стал римской колонией. Теперь из его бухт отходили транспорты с зерном (став Великими, империи почему-то всегда начинают голодать), и навстречу им шли суда с бронзой, мрамором, статуями императоров, льняными и шелковыми тканями, порченой монетой, которую в ту пору таскали за собой мешками. Потом империя затрещала по всем швам �� она ведь из Великой сделалась Всемирной, �� кого-то убивали, что-то жгли, кому-то что-то доказывали и, конечно, ничего доказать не могли. А певцы и поэты творили, а императоры воевали, а юристы кодифицировали, а философы подводили подо все базу �� город же прижался к земле и ждал, ждал, ждал, чем же все это кончится? Э! Да ничегошеньки он не ждал, он просто жил, как тысячу лет до этого, и все! Ловил и солил рыбу, сеял хлеб, давил вино, справлял свадьбы и ни о чем больше не думал.”
― Ю. Домбровский

“Sarcasm is the new staircase to stardom.”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.'

The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants�� development.

[...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee