Harvey Cushing Quotes

You go to the airport and look at the bookstand, and you feel the titles are similar, the covers are similar, and you wonder how they can be different.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

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

I think in reality, today, if you use the same tools as everyone else, you kind of build the same products.

I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.

The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing 'tyranny' of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot withstand the briefest examination.

TV has made everyone so vanilla it's nearly impossible to tell one anchor apart from another.

So many people want to have this typical look and this typical everything and it's all the same everywhere.

I don't honestly have the time or energy to support anybody else's cause but my own, which is self-expression. So I guess, if I had a cause, it would be education.

The world needs more standardization, less innovation.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

The 'futures' and 'careers' for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

Efficiency obliterates identity

The jean! The jean is the destructor. It is a dictator! It is destroying creativity! The jean must be stopped!

what bothers me today is the lack of, well, i guess you'd call it authentic experience. so much is a sham. so much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized...we're standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. the sham is everywhere.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

Now, a good education is about so much more than just learning geometry or memorizing dates in history. All of that is important, but an education is also about exploring new things -- discovering what makes you come alive, and then being your best at whatever you choose

It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.