A Quote by John Mortimer
The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors' surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.
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We know about bad guys, what they do, and often, who they are. The politicians have chosen to send us into battle, and that's our trade. We do what's necessary. And in my view, once those politicians have elected to send us out to do what 99.9 percent of the country would be terrified to undertake, they should get the hell out of the way and stay there.
I usually have about four books on the go - a bedside book, a lavatory book, a downstairs book, and the book in my study that I read sneakily while I should be writing. Short stories for the lavatory, obviously.
I don't even think much about politicians. I think about the people in the audience who applaud the politicians. They are your fellow countrymen and they're the ones you live with - that should be who we target for education and enlightenment.
I reject criticism because the last thing I wanted was to sit there and look at people talking. I think people are conditioned to think of documentaries now as talking heads. This movie about Valentino is not about that at all. It's about watching people in action. To the critics who wanted more talking heads, I send a dozen dead roses.
Most of us are waiting. We're waiting for something interesting to happen. And I think we're going to wait forever if we don't do something more interesting with our lives.
Structurally I don't see a fundamental difference between what we may reasonably expect of police and doctors - though obviously the fact that doctors are generally pursuing life-saving activities and police may be engaged in life-threatening activities may lead to differences in how we construe the moral limits to their roles.
What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood.
Parents who've not had an education themselves find it hard to explain to their children what a decent education involves, and I completely understand that. Parents themselves need to be educated by schools about what sort of education they should expect for their children. I do think there's a heavy responsibility of the school.
The ideals and the values of the United States inspired the entire world. I don't think any of us can say that our standing in the world now, the way children around the world look at the United States, is the same. And part of what we need to do is to send a message to the world that we are going to invest in issues like education, we are going to invest in issues that relate to how ordinary people are able to live out their dreams. And that is something that I'm going to be committed to as president of the United States.
Work is the greatest means of education. To train children to work, to work systematically, to love work, and to put their brains into work, may be called the end and aim of schools. In education, no work should be done for the sake of the thing done, but for the sake of the growing mind.
The fact is that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians - they've always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They'd lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that's all they've done. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life.
It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.
I may have no idea what I'm talking about," I said, a little ticked off now. "But we're all a part of a minority waiting for a majority to pull their heads out of their asses.
I don't think you should rely on medicine. I think you should rely upon herbal doctors, acupuncture, and doctors outside the medical world, with different kinds and forms of treatment.
Well, I don't think we should go to the moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.
I think just as armament had a major impact of a negative kind in the world, education is something which has a major impact of a positive kind in the world. And I think the American population, with its humanity and with its concern about the future of the world, has a real reason to think about what it can do to help the world in expanding education.
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