You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times Quotes

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I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficie...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, a...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but re...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience... War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does no...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all ...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given ins...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard ...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the ...

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times