This defective approach to scholarship was suffered by different categories of colonial student. Many of them had been handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates of worthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle.
Kwame NkrumahRelated topics
administration age approach carry category colonial concrete defective different early fit lack lost reason scholarship traditional universalism vague variance rootsRelated quotes
The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. .... I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way. Carving is more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience and clay to the visual attitude. An idea for carving must be clearly formed before starting and sustained during the long process of working; also, there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature.
Barbara Hepworth
Personally, I never met Knut Wicksell. I saw him once when he delivered a lecture in Oslo, but being an unassuming student at the time, I did not have the courage to talk to him. So my knowledge of his theory came only through his writings. That, however, was a very intense and absorbing form of making his acquaintance. Already from my early student days, I read his writings (in German and Swedish) avidly. And I continued to do so later.
When I started my study on Wicksell, I found that his works were not easy reading. Often it was only at the third or fourth reading that I grasped his ideas. Invariably, each new reading made me more and more enthusiastic. Sometimes it happened that I thought I had finally caught him in an inconsistency or in unclear thinking. Every time this happened, it turned out, however, that the error was mine.
Ragnar Frisch
Had there not been a natural goodness and indestructible force in my father, I see not how be could have bodied himself forth from these mean impediments. I suppose good precepts were not wanting. There was the Bible to read. Old John Orr, the schoolmaster, used from time to time to lodge with them; be was religious and enthusiastic (though in practice irregular with drink). In my grandfather, also, there seems to have been a certain geniality; for instance, he and a neighbor, Thomas Hogg, read "Anson's Voyages;" also tho "Arabian Nights," for which latter my father, armed with zealous conviction, scrupled not to censure them openly. By one means and another, at an early age he had acquired principles, lights that not only flickered, but shone steadily to guide his way.
Thomas Carlyle
Many people fail to grasp this point, apparently because they think of "scientific" evidence as only that produced in laboratories by controlled experiments. This leads them to treat field studies, however careful, thorough and well-documented, as "anecdotal"--mere preparation for the real thing, therefore properly ignored till it bears fruit entitled to be considered by learned persons. This attitude was much like that of cavalry generals in the First World War, waiting patiently for the infantry to clear the ground so that they could make the dashing charges that alone they thought entitled the name of warfare. Because these creatures are complex, only a tiny fraction of important truths about them can ever be seen in laboratories of expressed in control experiments. The same, of course, is true of the human race.
Mary Midgley
Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision. Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to live.
Margaret Sanger