A Quote by Jonathan Kozol

Consider what it is like to go into a new classroom and to see before you suddenly, and in a way you cannot avoid recognizing, the dreadful consequences of a year's wastage of so many lives.
You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.
I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
In that disputable point of persecuting men for conscience sake, I see such dreadful consequences rising, I would be as fully convinced of the truth of it, as a mathematical demonstration, before I would venture to act upon it or make it a part of my religion.
If people are going to do things which have certain consequences that they would rather avoid, they should do whatever they need to avoid the consequences.
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.
As far as actually setting up colonies of people who would live their whole lives in space, I think we're a long ways from doing that yet, and I think we have many, many decades before we could be able to even consider something like that.
It's very encouraging to see the structural changes that the RNC has made this past year in engaging communities on the ground. Recognizing that the way to reach voters is to go into their communities instead of reaching out from an office in Washington DC is essential for victory in elections today.
It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II].
People don't like it, but inevitably we need to think about both the costs and the benefits of health care. We cannot avoid the financial consequences.
Living in a bubble as I said in a featherbed of privilege. That's why leaving home, leaving the prep school and going to the University of Michigan in the early '60s was a moment of awakening and to go to a place like Michigan and to see suddenly a world in flames and the injustices all around was quite a wake up call. I lasted a year and a half at Michigan before I dropped out and joined the merchant marines and I was a merchant marine for my sophomore year then I came back to Michigan.
We've all seen so many plays where there's brilliant acting and suddenly there's so many dreadful punches that it takes you out of the moment, or somebody does some bit of violence that jars.
You cannot avoid war in life, you cannot avoid the fear of terrorism, you cannot avoid those things now, they are a part of everyday demeanor.
I consider myself allergic to gossip and tabloids, and go out of my way to avoid them.
If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.
We avoid the things that we're afraid of because we think there will be dire consequences if we confront them. But the truly dire consequences in our lives come from avoiding things that we need to learn about or discover.
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