People seem to want to follow the beaten path. The difficulty is that the beaten path doesn't seem to be leading anywhere.
The problem is a lot of people don't think. The general bloke just goes through life, gets a job, gets married and all that, and that's it.
[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.
If you always make the right decision, the safe decision, the one most people make, you will be the same as everyone else.
If you're still doing what mommy and daddy said for you to do (go to school, get a job, and save money), you're losing.
I was very studious and square in college.
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 are placed in a set of circumstances where we have to take initiative and be creative, some of us find it hard to transition. Those people have been trained not to think but to obey orders. They are slaves to the training, unconsciously pledging allegiance to the average. Mentally they recite from the manual of mediocrity.
I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.
This kind of thing always amazed Ginny--people who just walked away from institutions. People who left school when they didn't see the point. Aunt Peg had done that. Ginny knew she never would. That either made her someone who worked hard and finished things, or someone who didn't have the guts to break away from the pack. Maybe both.
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
The younger generation is supposed to rage against the machine, not for it. They're supposed to question authority, not question those who question authority.
