Agnes Smedley Quotes

A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye in the back of his head.

Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

I never expect a soldier to think.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

Any pile of stunted growth unaware that entertainment is just that and nothing more deserves to doom themselves to some dank cell somewhere for having been so stupid!! Movies, books, T.V., music - they're all just entertainment, not guidebooks for damning yourself!

For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.

What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action?

... let us recall the well-known statement of a university professor in the Republic of the Massagetes: 'Not the faculty but His Excellency the General can properly determine the sum of two and two.'

Answers given with authority negate the search for truth.

Laziness and cowardice explain why so many men. . . remain under a life-long tutelage and why it is so easy for some men to set themselves up as the guardians of all the rest. . . If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides my diet, I need not trouble myself. If I am willing to pay, I need not think. Others will do it for me.

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

While we're waiting for a cab I'll give you your lesson for today. Don't listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don't pay attention. Just, just see what they look like and that's how you'll know what life is really gonna be like.

The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track - that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

When I was a kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that much. I think that's because they were assuming that 99 percent of the time, we'd be interacting with worthy, smart adults... They didn't ever tell me 'Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and authority figures. You don't have to do what they say.