Richard Mitchell Quotes

• Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.

  Richard Mitchell

  Educational, School, America

  45 Copy quote

• We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.

  Richard Mitchell

  Justice, Would Be, Asking

  8 Copy quote

• There is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words.

  Richard Mitchell

  Judging, Mind, Way

  4 Copy quote

• People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

  Richard Mitchell

  Educational, Writing, Technology

  8 Copy quote

• Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.

  Richard Mitchell

  School, Tyrants, People

  Richard Mitchell (1987). “The leaning tower of Babel and other affronts by the Underground grammarian”, Fireside

  7 Copy quote

• You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.

  Richard Mitchell

  Society, Way, Vegetarian

  9 Copy quote

• If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.

  Richard Mitchell

  Silly, Thinking, Choices

  5 Copy quote

• There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education.

  Richard Mitchell

  Education, Sex, Children

  8 Copy quote

• If you should prefer to understand that children are those human beings who have not yet found the grasp of their own minds, then the task you have given yourself, that task of rearing a child wisely and well, is suddenly transformed from indoctrination to education, in its truest sense, and made not only possible but even likely--provided, to be sure, one little prerequisite, which is that you are not a child, that you have come into the grasp of your mind.

  Richard Mitchell

  Children, Mind, Tasks

  7 Copy quote

• Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact.

  Richard Mitchell

  Long, Birth Control, Facts

  7 Copy quote

• Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.

  Richard Mitchell

  Wisdom, Simple, Order

  8 Copy quote

• Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.

  Richard Mitchell

  Ignorance, Laughing, Special

  7 Copy quote

• Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education.

  Richard Mitchell

  Important, Benefits, Language

  4 Copy quote

• Education, I am convinced, must be nothing more than this: The journey toward the limits of Reason, if any there be.

  Richard Mitchell

  Journey, Limits, Reason

  4 Copy quote

• In a government institution, there is only one area in which problems are taken seriously, and that is the political. Many of the strange things done in American educationism suddenly become perfectly understandable when we see them not as educational methods but as political maneuvers. We must understand illiteracy, therefore, the root of ignorance and thoughtlessness, as not some inadvertent failure to accomplish what was intended but simply a political arrangement of great value to somebody.

  Richard Mitchell

  Educational, Taken, Ignorance

  4 Copy quote

• An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.

  Richard Mitchell

  Children, Clever, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• Training is a good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend, and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all.

  Richard Mitchell

  Dog, Strong, Should Have

  14 Copy quote

• If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.

  Richard Mitchell

  School, Land, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• Who speaks reason to his fellow man bestows it upon them.

  Richard Mitchell

  Men, Fellow Man, Speak

  4 Copy quote

• If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave.

  Richard Mitchell

  Language, Slave, Masters

  4 Copy quote

• Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.

  Richard Mitchell

  Teacher, Pain, Training

  7 Copy quote

• A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.

  Richard Mitchell

  Running, Heart, Meditation

  4 Copy quote

• A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe in which responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is IMMORAL.

  Richard Mitchell

  Writing, Brain, Mind

  9 Copy quote

• Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.

  Richard Mitchell

  Exercise, Thinking, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.

  Richard Mitchell

  Mind, Technique, Use

  4 Copy quote

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