Ronald Takaki · 508 pages
Rating: (3.2K votes)
“I believe our education system as a whole has not integrated the histories of all people into our education system, just the Eurocentric view of itself, and the White-centered view of African Americans, and even this is slim to nonexistent. What I find is that most people don't know the fact they don't know, because of the complete lack of information.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“the study of diversity is essential for understanding how and why America became what Walt Whitman called a “teeming nation of nations.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“Jefferson exploded with guilt: “The torment of mind, I will endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall not owe a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“ The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“What I find is that most people don’t know the fact that they don’t know, because of the complete lack of information.”4”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“War is our only recourse. There is no other remedy.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“War exists notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it.”8”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“In 1852, of the 11,794 Chinese in California, only seven were women.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.”
― quote from Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
“On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.”
― Shelby Foote, quote from The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?”
― Patti Smith, quote from M Train
“It’s easy to observe when you sit back and listen, if you truly listen to someone rather than preparing to respond to what they’re saying. It’s the difference in creative listening and reactive listening.”
― Meghan Quinn, quote from Dear Life
“The final insult to all of this is that when Trump secured the nomination, media companies looked down at their bottom lines and realized that, via the profits they made during his run—Trump is “good for business,” CBS president Les Moonves infamously confessed—they had been made accomplices to the whole affair. —”
― Matt Taibbi, quote from Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus
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