Jeanette Winterson Quotes

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

Once you have people around you who don't question you, you're in a dangerous place.

The value of making young people stupid, subject to an educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are reviewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.

Power-over is resorted to time without number because people will not wait for the slower process of education.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

Fortunately, I grew up in a traditional family where questioning was encouraged, particularly by my pandit grandfather. We are all voracious readers, seeking knowledge. I learn a lot from discussions with my wife, siblings and parents.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.

If the education of our kids comes from radio, television, newspapers - if that's where they get most of their knowledge from, and not from the schools, then the powers that be are definitely in charge, because they own all those outlets.

If you don't give education to people, it is easy to manipulate them.

A child knows when they are on the receiving end of a didactic exercise, or when they are sitting in the shadow of something else.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew. To say you've got to inquire, you've got to be testing your knowledge all the time in order to be more effective in what you're doing.

You know, you can't make the people do what you want them to do.

As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.

What I'd really like to control is not machines, but people.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.

It is important that students bring a certain …, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.