James G. Stavridis Quotes
Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.
Stavridis, James G. "A Navy Admiral's Thoughts on Global Security." TED, June 2012.
The Humber and the Thames are two major rivers of England." ""the Great
The initial great military success in Afghanistan was in great part the result of the military focus of the mission. Later there were other objectives added as a part of nation building and these proved very difficult—especially the elimination of corruption.
In early America, as today, there was a substantial element of American society who distrusted intellectuals and education. They saw education as promoting inequality and leading to an aristocracy. Reading was actually attacked by many on the grounds that one’s thinking skills would atrophy. (Today we worry about TV eroding reading skills.) “Summum bonum” is Latin meaning “the Highest Good”.
There are two things that make this quotation interesting, First it tells us about the educational gender discrimination in early Massachusetts. But not his phrase “light soon broke in”. He obviously saw the lack of education for girls as undesirable and unenlightened. But the fact that he had this attitude and would express is so readily in 1857 tells us that, at least in the Northeast girls’ education was assumed by many as part of civilized society.
She was referring to Malala, a young Pakistani girl who was shot and badly wounded in an assassination attempt. She had publicly advocated girls attendance at school—a practice banned by the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban.
James George Stavridis is a retired United States Navy admiral, and bestselling author, currently an operating executive with the Carlyle Group and chair of the board of counselors at McLarty Associates. His novel, "2034: A Novel of the Next World War," was co-written with Elliot Ackerman and published in March, 2021. It debuted at #6 on the New York Times bestseller list. In August 2018, he stepped down as the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a graduate school for international affairs. Stavridis serves as the chief international diplomacy and national security analyst for NBC News in New York. He is also chair Emeritus of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
