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1 " For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, " Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of " Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner. "
2 " Historians of technology have asked why no industrial revolution developed in antiquity. The simple answer seems to be that there was no need, that contemporary modes of production and the slave-based economy of the day satisfactorily maintained the status quo. The capitalist idea of profit as a desirable end to pursue was completely foreign to the contemporary mentality. So, too, was the idea that technology on a large scale could or should be harnessed to those ends. An industrial revolution was literally unthinkable in antiquity. "
― James E. McClellan
3 " Fine. Fine. Let’s try. You asked why bad things happen to good people. Well, the simple answer is, there are no bad things and there are no good people. Nothing bad ever happens to anyone and people are neither good nor bad. A person is nothing. A person does not exist. There are no people. "
― Dorothy Gravelle , Paradox Love
4 " I am frequently asked by people if I would like to be known or remembered for being a Great Poet or a Great Writer. The simple answer is this:There are many Great Poets and even more Great Writers, thus I answer and say, I would like to be remembered as a capable poet that was a good writer that possessed a truly loving soul, and that all may know, for me, this was great enough. "
― Tonny K. Brown