An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
People know more about baseball players' contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children's lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, 'Do you want to bring a child into this world?' That's pretty dire.
Is it really that important? It's just television, for God's sake. It's not medicine or something.
Everyone asks if a man is rich, no one if he is good.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
Civilization does everything for the mind and favors it entirely at the expense of the body.
I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.
In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
The social rights of children must be recognized so that a world suited to their needs may be constructed for them. The greatest crime that society commits is that of wasting the money which it should use for children on things that will destroy them and society itself as well.
What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society's business were making people insteadof profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?
It's easy to put [serious threats] aside, and the media don't talk about them. Other things are more important. How am I going to put food on the table tomorrow? That's what I've got to worry about, and so on. It's very serious, but it's hard to bring out the enormity of these issues, when they do not have the dramatic character of something you can show in the movies, with a nuclear weapons falling and everything disappears.
The fact that we live in a world that moves crisis by crisis does not make a growing interest in outdoor activities frivolous, or ample provision for them unworthy of the nation's concern.
The problem is that Americans care more about saving whales than saving males.
Americans have been dumbed down to the point where more people watching 'American Idol' than listen to the state of the union address. And that's too bad. I'm not trying to take any bread out of the mouth of Simon Cowell, but if the president is speaking to the people of the United States, and people are going to watch 'American Idol,' that's sad.
More than we sleep, play, or make love, we work. Yet despite - or perhaps because of - this dominant daily grind, much of our literature is biased toward other pursuits.
God pays twice as much attention on Christmas, like the media when a white kid goes missing.
If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.
Dreams have a vise-like grip on the people of Islam. We never grasped that it was more useful to let our Muslims dream than to build them schools, hospitals and factories.
We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...
You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21st Century: One that worries about how we feel or the one that worries about making sure that the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody's lunch.
The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.
Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.
The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "John Gardner in 1979"){kind=small}
