Indebtedness and Freedom

"High levels of indebtedness cost you your freedom."
-John Anderson, Australian politician and podcaster

Robert Woodson on good excuses

 "'There’s nothing more lethal than giving someone a good excuse for their own failure."

Cicero on the need to know what you're talking about

"Let us stop wondering, then, why there are so few eloquent speakers, seeing that eloquence depends on the combination of all these accomplishments, anyone of which alone would be a tremendous task to perfect. Let us rather encourage our children, and all others whose fame and reputation are dear to us, to appreciate fully its enormous scope. They should not rely on the precepts or the teachers or the methods of practice in general use, but be confident that they can achieve their goals by means that are of a quite different order.  It is at least my opinion that it will be impossible for anyone to be an orator endowed with all praiseworthy qualities, unless he has gained a knowledge of all the important subjects and arts. For it is certainly from knowledge that a speech should blossom and acquire fullness: unless the orator has firmly grasped the underlying subject matter, his speech will remain an utterly empty, yes, almost childish verbal exercise."

To want to know everything worth knowing

“We are born with minds, not books. We are not limited to what we read. . . The immediate origin of our knowledge comes from the fact that our minds are directed to the things out there that are not ourselves. Knowledge enables us to be more than ourselves with our own limited experience.

Education means both awareness of what is 'fresh from life' and what is 'strained' through books. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we can know everything. But to want to know everything worth knowing is no deception. It remains the goal of any education worthy of man.”

— James V. Schall, S.J.

Yi-Fu Tuan on Personal Experiential Space

From "II.4. Personal Experiential Space" in Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan:

"We get to know the world through the possibilities and limitations of our senses. The space that we can perceive spreads out before and around us, and is divisible into regions of differing quality. Farthest removed and covering the largest area is visual space. It is dominated by the broad horizon and small, indistinct objects. This purely visual region seems static even though things move in it. Closer to us is the visual-aural space: objects in it can be seen clearly and their noises are heard. Dynamism characterizes the feel of the visual-aural zone, and this sense of a lively world is the result of sound as much as spatial displacements that can be seen (Knapp, 1948). When we turn from the distant visual space to the visual-aural zone, it is though a silent movie comes into focus and is provided with sound tracks. Next to our body is the affective zone, which is accessible to the senses of smell and touch besides those of sight and hearing. In fact, the relative importance of sight diminishes in affective space; to appreciate the objects that give it emotional tone our eyes may even have to be closed. We cannot attend to all three zones at the same time. In particular, attendance to the purely visual region in the distance excludes awareness of the affective region. Normally we focus on the proximate world, either the intimate affective space or the more public visual-aural space...

Foreground and middle ground constitute the patent zone. Beyond the patent zone is the latent zone of habituality (the past), which is also the latent zone of potentiality (the future). Although I cannot see through the walls of the hall, the unfocused middle ground, I am subliminally aware of a world, not just empty space, beyond the walls. That latent zone is the zone of one's past experience, what I have seen before coming into the hall; it is also potentiality, what I shall see when I leave the hall. The latent zone is the invisible but necessary frame to the patent zone (Ortega y Gassett, 1963, p. 67; Ryan and Ryan, 1940). It acts as a ballast to activity, freeing activity from complete dependence on the patent, i.e., visible space and present time.

In characterizing the structure of space, I introduce the terms past, present, and future. The analysis of spatial experience seems to require the usage of time categories. This is because our awareness of the spatial relations of objects is never limited to the perceptions of the objects themselves; present awareness itself is imbued with past experiences of movement in time, with memories of past expenditures of energy, and it is drawn towards the future by the perceptual objects' call to action. A tree at the end of the road stretches out in advance, as it were, of the steps I have to take to reach it (Brain, 1959). Distance, depth, height, and breadth are not terms necessary to scientific discourse; they are common speech and derive their multiple meanings from commonplace experiences (Kockelman's, 1964; Straus, 1963, p. 263). Spatial dimensions are keyed to the human sense of adequacy, purpose, and standing. Certain heights are beyond my reach, given my present position or status. I feel inadequate and the objects around me appear alien, distant, and unapproachable. The window that is near seems very far once I have snuggled into bed. Distance shrinks and stretches in the course of the day and with the seasons as they affect my sense of well-being and adequacy (Dardel, 1952, p. 13)."


https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/Tuan_1979_space-place.pdf

The Organic City

"The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition the mind."

-Lewis Mumford


1717 Map of Madrid

Kindred souls turn up in the most unexpected places

"I feel a reassuring oneness with other people when I find that even my most intimate, anguished, socially inadmissible emotions and desires are known to others.... Kindred souls—indeed, my selves otherwise costumed—turn up in books in the most unexpected places. Discovering them is one of the great rewards of a liberal education. If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my stage of life can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers."

Yi-Fu Tuan Chinese-American human geographer

The Concert of Life

 "In the concert of life, no one gets a program."
-Dutch proverb

The Statesman

“This, then, is the aim of the statesman: to weave together the characters of the gentle and the brave... And having perfected the most glorious and best of all textures... he holds them together by this fabric... and rules and watches over them.”

-Plato from Statesman

Tocqueville on the essential role of voluntary associations in American life

"Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association... I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it...

Feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another. I have shown that these influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be accomplished by associations."

-Tocqueville, Democracy in America

See my article in Law and Liberty, "The Mother Science of Democracy"

Thompkins H Matteson's 1862 painting, Hop Picking.

Learning and the future

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
-Eric Hoffer

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
-Malcolm X