Christopher Dawson Quotes

Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network.

One cannot be independent of the deep thinking of the people.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way.

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

I'm one of those women who likes to chat and share knowledge and pass it around.

I think the opportunity to bring together the people in the world of politics, business and entertainment and have an opportunity to listen to their best learning and thinking is a great opportunity.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

And I'm walking along and we're laughing, kidding, joking, and see he understood the leader, the one we called the leader, had some knowledge of English, although limited.

Learning in a face-to-face human community, as humans have evolved to do over hundreds of thousands of years, may always be the ideal - especially in an endeavor that is as relationship-driven as business.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.

Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government?

Those Asians who come back with their MBA from America don’t come back to fight with each other. They come back to trade with each other.

Learning and the exchange of ideas is dramatic.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative.

Every breeze wafts intelligence from country to country, every wave rolls it and gives it forth, and all in turn receive it. There is a vast commerce of ideas, there are marts and exchanges for intellectual discoveries, and a wonderful fellowship of those individual intelligences which make up the minds and opinions of the age.

Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.

It is with books as with the fires of our grates, everybody borrows a light from his neighbor to kindle his own, which in turn is communicated to others, and each partakes of all.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.

If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.