Richard Mitchell Quotes

#1. Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact.

Richard Mitchell

#2. People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

Richard Mitchell

#3. The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.

Richard Mitchell

#4. Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education.

Richard Mitchell

#5. Who speaks reason to his fellow man bestows it upon them.

Richard Mitchell

#6. If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.

Richard Mitchell

#7. His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.

Richard Mitchell

#8. An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.

Richard Mitchell

#9. Well, I've known plenty of mean girls, who would take my money away, So I give 'em my heart and my love, just to watch 'em cry

Richard Mitchell

#10. Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.

Richard Mitchell

#11. Here is a truth that most teachers will not tell you, even if they know it: Good training is a continual friend and a solace; it helps you now, and assures you of help in the future. Good education is a continual pain in the neck, and assures you always of more of the same.

Richard Mitchell

#12. When we find ourselves wondering about the meaning of conditions and events, its always useful to ask, who profits?

Richard Mitchell

#13. Education, I am convinced, must be nothing more than this: The journey toward the limits of Reason, if any there be.

Richard Mitchell

#14. And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

Richard Mitchell

#15. If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.

Richard Mitchell

#16. His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

Richard Mitchell

#17. Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.

Richard Mitchell

#18. Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.

Richard Mitchell

#19. Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.

Richard Mitchell

#20. You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.

Richard Mitchell

#21. There is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words.

Richard Mitchell

#22. We should ... be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.

Richard Mitchell

#23. There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education.

Richard Mitchell