161In this age of intensive media coverage, it is no longer possible for a society to regard any woman or man as a hero. The reputation of anyone who is subjected to media scrutiny will eventually be diminished.
162One often hears about the need for individuals to take responsibility for their own lives. However, the conditions in which people find themselves have been largely established long before people become aware of them. Thus, the concept of personal responsibility is much more complicated and unrealistic than is often assumed.
163Most people live, whether physically or morally, in a very restricted circle. They make use of a very limited portion of the resources available to them until they face a great problem or crisis.
164Sometimes imagination is a more valuable asset than experience. People who lack experience are free to imagine what is possible and thus can approach a task without constraints of established habits and attitudes.
165In any given field, the leading voices come from people who are motivated not by conviction but by the desire to present opinions and ideas that differ from those held by the majority.
166Over the past century, the most significant contribution of technology has been to make peoples lives more comfortable.
167It is impossible for an effective political leader to tell the truth all the time. Complete honesty is not a useful virtue for a politician.
168Critical judgment of work in any given field has little value unless it comes from someone who is an expert in that field.
169Those who treat politics and morality as though they were separate realms fail to understand either the one or the other.
170The surest indicator of a great nation is not the achievements of its rulers, artists, or scientists, but the general welfare of all its people.
171People who pursue their own intellectual interests for purely personal reasons are more likely to benefit the rest of the world than are people who try to act for the public good.
172Important truths begin as outrageous, or at least uncomfortable, attacks upon the accepted wisdom of the time.
173Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways.
174Laws should not be rigid or fixed. Instead, they should be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times, and places.
175It is always an individual who is the impetus for innovation; the details may be worked out by a team, but true innovation results from the enterprise and unique perception of an individual.
176The function of science is to reassure; the purpose of art is to upset. Therein lies the value of each.
177The study of an academic discipline alters the way we perceive the world. After studying the discipline, we see the same world as before, but with different eyes.
178It is possible to pass laws that control or place limits on peoples behavior, but legislation cannot reform human nature. Laws cannot change what is in peoples hearts and minds.
179What most human beings really want to attain is not knowledge, but certainty. Gaining real knowledge requires taking risks and keeping the mind openbut most people prefer to be reassured rather than to learn the complex and often unsettling truth about anything.
180Many problems of modern society cannot be solved by laws and the legal system because moral behavior cannot be legislated.
181The way students and scholars interpret the materials they work with in their academic fields is more a matter of personality than of training. Different interpretations come about when people with different personalities look at exactly the same objects, facts, data, or events and see different things.
182It is dangerous to trust only intelligence.
183As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more complex and more mysterious.
184It is a grave mistake to theorize before one has data.
185Scandalswhether in politics, academia, or other areascan be useful. They focus our attention on problems in ways that no speaker or reformer ever could.
186Practicality is now our great idol, which all powers and talents must serve. Anything that is not obviously practical has little value in todays world.
187It is easy to welcome innovation and accept new ideas. What most people find difficult, however, is accepting the way these new ideas are put into practice.
188Success, whether academic or professional, involves an ability to survive in a new environment and, eventually, to change it.
189If people disregard the great works of the past, it is because these works no longer answer the needs of the present.
190As long as people in a society are hungry or out of work or lack the basic skills needed to survive, the use of public resources to support the arts is inappropriateand, perhaps, even cruelwhen one considers all the potential uses of such money.
191Education should be equally devoted to enriching the personal lives of students and to training students to be productive workers.
192Success in any realm of life comes more often from taking chances or risks than from careful and cautious planning.
193It is not the headline-making political events but the seldom-reported social tranformations that have the most lasting significance.
194The best preparation for life or a career is not learning to be competitive, but learning to be cooperative.
195The goal of politics should not be the pursuit of an ideal, but rather the search for common ground and reasonable consensus.
196Technology creates more problems than it solves, and may threaten or damage the quality of life.
197The material progress and well-being of one country are necessarily connected to the material progress and well-being of all other countries.
198Instead of encouraging conformity, society should show greater appreciation of individual differences.
199Truly innovative ideas do not arise from groups of people, but from individuals. When groups try to be creative, the members force each other to compromise and, as a result, creative ideas tend to be weakened and made more conventional. Most original ideas arise from individuals working alone.
200The most elusive knowledge is self-knowledge, and it is usually acquired through solitude, rather than through interaction with others.
201The purpose of education should be to provide students with a value system, a standard, a set of ideasnot to prepare them for a specific job.
202Unlike great thinkers and great artists, the most effective political leaders must often yield to public opinion and abandon principle for the sake of compromise.
203The best way to understand the character of a society is to examine the character of the men and women that the society chooses as its heroes or its heroines.
204We learn through direct experience; to accept a theory without experiencing it is to learn nothing at all.
205As societies all over the world have more and more access to new information, the effects on life-long learning can only be positive.
206People are too quick to take action; instead they should stop to think of the possible consequences of what they might do.
207Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are.
208The way people look, dress, and act reveals their attitudes and interests. You can tell much about a societys ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people.
209Progress is best made through discussion among people who have contrasting points of view.
210Most people choose a career on the basis of such pragmatic considerations as the needs of the economy, the relative ease of finding a job, and the salary they can expect to make. Hardly anyone is free to choose a career based on his or her natural talents or interest in a particular kind of work.
211Any decision-whether made by government, by a corporation, or by an individual person-must take into account future conditions more than present conditions.
212If a goal is worthy, then any means taken to attain it is justifiable.
213Too much emphasis has been placed on the need for students to challenge the assertions of others. In fact, the ability to compromise and work with othersthat is, the ability to achieve social harmonyshould be a major goal in every school.
214Society should identify those children who have special talents and abilities and begin training them at an early age so that they can eventually excel in their areas of ability. Otherwise, these talents are likely to remain undeveloped.
215The bombardment of visual images in contemporary society has the effect of making people less able to focus clearly and extensively on a single issue over a long period of time.
216Most important discoveries or creations are accidental: it is usually while seeking the answer to one question that we come across the answer to another.
217In order to produce successful original work, scholars and scientists must first study the successful work of others to learn what contributions remain to be made.
218In order for any work of artwhether film, literature, sculpture, or a songto have merit, it must be understandable to most people.
219Now that computer technology has made possible the rapid accessing of large amounts of factual information, people are less likely than ever to think deeply or originally. They feel unable to compete withmuch less contribute tothe quantity of information that is now available electronically.
220The increase in knowledge is forcing people to specialize. As a result, the distance between fields of specialization has become so vast that specialists in different areas are rarely able to influence each other.
221The chief benefit of the study of history is to break down the illusion that people in one period of time are significantly different from people who lived at any other time in history.
222Learning for learnings sake is an outdated concept. Today, education must serve an ulterior purpose and be directed toward clear goals.
223Education is primarily a personal matter; it has little to do with school or college.
224Censorship is rarely, if ever, justified.
225People often look for similarities, even between very different things, and even when it is unhelpful or harmful to do so. Instead, a thing should be considered on its own terms; we should avoid the tendency to compare it to something else.
226People are mistaken when they assume that the problems they confront are more complex and challenging than the problems faced by their predecessors. This illusion is eventually dispelled with increased knowledge and experience.
227To remain vigorous, any academic field needs to be led by truly independent thinkers who are willing to ignore established boundaries and challenge long-standing assumptions.
228The best way to teachwhether as an educator, employer, or parentis to praise positive actions and ignore negative ones.
229The best way to learn a new subject or skill is to study small segments or details in great depth rather than to start by trying to develop a sense of the whole.
230College studentsand people in generalprefer to follow directions rather than make their own decisions. Therefore, colleges should eliminate as many choices as possible in order to offer students clear direction.
23139;Moderation in all things is ill-considered advice. Rather, one should say, Moderation in most things, since many areas of human concern require or at least profit from intense focus.
232The purpose of education should be to create an academic environment that is separate from the outside world. This kind of environment is ideal because it allows students to focus on important ideas without being held back by practical concerns.
233Although innovations such as video, computers, and the Internet seem to offer schools improved methods for instructing students, these technologies all too often distract from real learning.
234Most people prefer restrictions and regulations to absolute freedom of choice, although they would probably deny such a preference.
235Most people are taught that loyalty is a virtue. But loyaltywhether to ones friends, to ones school or place of employment, or to any institutionis all too often a destructive rather than a positive force.
236Encouraging young people to believe that they can accomplish great things if they try hard enough is both misleading and potentially harmful.
237Computers and video technology can make facsimiles of original works such as paintings and historical documents available to everyone. The great advantage of this new technology is that it will enable anyonenot just scholarsto conduct in-depth research without having access to the original works.
238Conformity almost always leads to a deadening of individual creativity and energy.
239Much of the information that people assume is factual actually turns out to be inaccurate. Thus, any piece of information referred to as a fact should be mistrusted since it may well be proven false in the future.
240Although it is easy to respond positively to the work of another person or group, it is far more worthwhile to give negative feedback.
241An individuals greatness cannot be judged objectively by his or her contemporaries; the most objective evaluators of a persons greatness are people who belong to a later time.
242Societies should try to save every plant and animal species, regardless of the expense to humans in effort, time, and financial well-being.
243The true value of a civilization is reflected in its artistic creations rather than in its scientific accomplishments.
244Most societies do not take their greatest thinkers seriously, even when they claim to admire them.
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