Unlearning Quotes

Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation. (Bell hooks)
A good deal of education consists of unlearning - the breaking of bad habits, as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar education: where other colleges aimed at development, bringing out what was already there like a seed waiting to sprout, Vassar remade a girl. Vassar was transformational. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
The deeper education consists in unlearning one's first education. View quote
Paul Valéry
Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us. View quote
Marianne Williamson
Personal growth is not a matter of learning new information but of unlearning old limits. View quote
Alan Cohen
Artists working for other artists is all about knowing, learning, unlearning, initiating long-term artistic dialogues, making connections, creating covens, and getting temporary shelter from the storm. View quote
Jerry Saltz
After long generations of trouble, persecution and hatred, England had at last won through to a period of domestic peace and individual freedom. It was not a period of avowed idealism; it was not a period of legislative reform. But neither idealism nor reform is the whole of life for men or nations. The vigour and initiative of Englishmen, at home and overseas, in all branches of human effort and intellect, were the admiration of Eighteenth Century Europe. The greatness of England in the Hanoverian epoch was made by men acting freely in a free community, with little help indeed from Church or State, but with no hindrance. The great art of letting your neighbour alone, even if he thinks differently from you, was learnt by Englishmen under Walpole, at a time when the lesson was still a strange one elsewhere. Some European countries have not learnt it to this day or are rapidly unlearning it again. View quote
G. M. Trevelyan
Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn. (Edward Bulwer-Lytton)