John C. Wright Quotes

Educators know there are only two types of schooling: indoctrination and education.
Indoctrination teaches a student how to cleave to a party line, and to recite the slogans and bromides of the accepted conformity. He is taught only how to swallow lies, and there is no assurance he will not swallow the propaganda of foes as easily as that of friends. Such folk are hopelessly provincial to their time and place. Unable to distinguish truth from fable, they swallow both or spit both out, and become zealots, or, worse yet, cynics. The zealot holds that truth can be won with no effort; the cynic, that no effort will suffice.
Education teaches the art of skeptical inquiry. The student learns the thoughts of all the great minds of the past, so that the implications and mistakes of philosophy of various schools are not unknown to him. And he learns, first, current scientific theories and, second, how frail and temporary such theories can be. He learns to be undeceived by those who claim to know a last and final truth.

Merlin and Solomon can tell you how well the wise and learned can withstand the foolishness of love!

Unliving things have no passions, and no memory: mere matter is the amnesia of the universe.

Come on, Amelia. We are not really British. We do not have to look down our noses at honest labor.

What can you do?"
"I can bring you in dream to one who dreams of you."
"Will that help me?"
"No. But you will come, because you will hope that it will.

We are indeed human beings. We are merely not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a species, something into which one is born. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.

Sometimes the best in people comes out during emergencies. Sometimes not.

Broken oaths are bad luck eggs."
That was so weird, I did not know what to say. So I said, "Eggs?"
"They hatch bad luck.

Whatever dwelt among the stars had nothing to do with earthly concerns. I wonder if you will understand me if I said, staring at the indifference of the cold heavens, that I never felt less religious than in that moment, but staring at their majesty, the grandeur, I never felt more. Cruel Saturn’s created world was worthy of awe.

I will grant you three wishes, but do not ask for immortality without asking for eternal youth.

Miss Daw said, half to herself, “Now you have had your first lesson in what it is like to be a real grown-up woman in a man’s world, my dear. We are judged by our looks, and men are not.”

When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.
Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word “innocent” does not mean “naïve,” it means “not guilty.”
Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grownups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don’t? Aren’t they more innocent than children, not less?

Everyone loses in war, even the winners.

Everything is inanimate, if by that you mean things that operate according to cause and effect. Free will is an epiphenomenon, a misjudgment impressed upon us and sustained by the actions of brain molecules in motion.

You were raised perfectly well, better than most. If you feel that the world has treated you unfairly, you have achieved a state of mind well known to all teenagers, but maintained only by adults of a more shrill and self-absorbed type.