A Quote by Ilana Mercer
The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.
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I think that we have positive moments in our history and negative moments in our history. We incarcerated Japanese Americans in the state of Colorado, in Camp Amache. You could say that's part of our heritage; I would say it's a shameful part of our heritage and not something we should repeat.
Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
If we were born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter.
If we were born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother.
If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.
Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.
In the years of the Roman Republic, before the Christian era, Roman education was meant to produce those character traits that would make the ideal family man. Children were taught primarily to be good to their families. To revere gods, one's parents, and the laws of the state were the primary lessons for Roman boys. Cicero described the goal of their child rearing as "self- control, combined with dutiful affection to parents, and kindliness to kindred.
We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.
Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.
Civics isn't something where you learned - learn it for a couple weeks in high school; it is who we are. Americans defined themselves by their Constitution. That is what creates us. This is our heritage, and you must know our heritage.
I thought my story, my experiences as a 2-year-old 'evacuee' from London at the outset of the war, could be important. What happened to me as a child was very light compared to what happened to many children, but... in Britain, there are so many people who just don't know our history.
Every child is born sane, and then, slowly slowly, we civilize him - we call it the process of civilization. We prepare him to become part of the great culture, the great church, the great state to which we belong. Our whole politics is stupid, and then HE becomes stupid. Our whole education is ugly. Our politics means nothing but ambition, naked ambition - ambition for power. And only the lowest kind of people become interested in power.
Perhaps the most significant thing a person can know about himself is to understand his own system of values. Almost every thing we do is a reflection of our own personal value system. What do we mean by values? Our values are what we want out of life. No one is born with a set of values. Except for our basic physiological needs such as air, water, and food, most of our values are acquired after birth.
A child born in a wealthy country is likely to consume, waste, and pollute more in his lifetime than 50 children born in developing nations. Our energy-burning lifestyles are pushing our planet to the point of no return. It is dawning on us at last that the life of our world is as vulnerable as the children we raise.
Is letting our children watch TV a form of child abuse? If our children grow up knowing everything about Britney Spears and nothing about nature or faith, about anything, is that not a form of child abuse?
If our rocks, our homes, our streets are our heritage... our Pol is our heritage, then the lifestyle that has emerged over time...that also is our heritage and that itself...is our soul. And it is this soul that connects us.
Mythology is part of our heritage, part of our identity at times because anywhere in India you will find the name of Rama or Krishna in one or the other form.
I believe that our democratic values are also born out of our Jewish faith, a 'love for the stranger,' and equality before the law - these are not foreign values: this is Judaism.
Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.
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