Jostein Gaarder Quotes
A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Translated by Paulette Møller, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
Turkey, the only Islamic nation where women have equal rights, made huge developmental and reform strides immediately after Ataturk reformed Turkish society and gave women the vote, freed them from veils and chadors, educated them and gave them equal employment rights. Turkey moved from an impoverished 3rd world nation to a modern industrialized democracy.
She was instrumental in outlawing slavery and two years after this speech she and her daughters appeared in public without the traditional Burka or veils. The conservative fundamentalists were outraged and they deposed her husband and her modern influence ended.
History has shown that as girls and women get educated and learn about family planning, their children are healthier and have better chances of survival and despite the lower death rate the population trend slows as a result of family planning.
The number of women who studied Physics and sophisticated sciences in Germany at the time were few and far between. Ironically, Einstein married one of the few. However, the marriage failed for many reasons and his subsequent marriage was not to a scientist. Other conversations with him in later years revealed that his belief was that women were constitutionally unsuited to creative, theoretical science—Einstein’s type of science was almost purely abstract and mathematical. See {588596}.
This remarkable statement was written in about 1840 and there was probably then few people of either gender who would think such a thing possible.
She was the First Lady, who in many ways was also one of the nation’s leading feminists. Betty Ford, Barbara Bush, and Hillary Clinton were also First Ladies who supported key feminist position but ER was 30 years ahead of them—a time when conservatives and sexists viewed her as a dangerous radical. For example, see {585211}.
Jostein Gaarder is a Norwegian intellectual and author of several novels, short stories and children's books. Gaarder often writes from the perspective of children, exploring their sense of wonder about the world. He often utilizes metafiction in his works and constructs stories within stories. His best known work is the novel Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (1991). It has been translated into 60 languages; there are over 40 million copies in print.
