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
Ronald Takaki
Born place: in Oahu, Hawaii, The United States
Born date April 12, 1939
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“Kiss me or let me go. I don’t care anymore.”
― Jennifer Estep, quote from Kiss of Frost
“he wouldn’t be driving an Audi –”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door
“Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced." He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.
What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is--that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.
Toward a psychology of the artist. -- If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them--this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.
In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power--until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is--art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ
“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from The Violent Bear It Away
“Oh, Ellie, you look beautiful. Like a Fey-tale princess.”
― C.L. Wilson, quote from Lady of Light and Shadows
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