In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“I propose that human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center. Both ‘high-level’ and ‘low-level’ brain regions, from the prefrontal cortices to the hypothalamus and brain stem, cooperate in the making of reason.
The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism’s survival. In turn, these lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, decision making, and, by extension, social behavior and creativity. Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason.”
– Antonio Damasio, 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, p. 36
“[C]ertain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use. We are faced by uncertainty when we have to make a moral judgment, decide on the course of a personal relationship, choose some means to prevent our being penniless in old age, or plan for the life that lies ahead. Emotion and feeling, along with the covert physiological machinery underlying them, assist us with the daunting task of predicting an uncertain future and planning our actions accordingly.”
– Antonio Damasio, 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, p. 35
“Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. They serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them. And feelings are neither intangible nor elusive. Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts.”
– Antonio Damasio, 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, p. 40
“What exactly do I mean when I speak of freedom in the home?
I mean a home which is not dominated by one or more adults, where each individual is as important as every other, and no more.
When two or more adults live together, there can only be harmony if they allow each other freedom of thought or action, in so far as it interferes with no one else.
I ask for children to be treated in the same way. It is surprising how reasonable children really are.”
– Winifred De Kok, 1935, Guiding Your Child Through The Formative Years, Chapter XIII, p. 132
“[T]he school system isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s further from the truth than Karl Popper. It’s wrong like the Catholic Church was wrong in refusing to accept Galileo’s heliocentrism and in locking him up so as to protect their worldview.”
– Christian Dean, 2022, Free to learn
“Most of us can see quite easily the irrationality of many other people’s justifications for coercing children. But it is in the nature of irrationality that we cannot see our own.”
– David Deutsch, 1997, Taking Children Seriously 23, ‘Conflicting Certainties’, The Taking Children Seriously survey
“We cannot, simply by desiring it, immediately create the knowledge that is required even to identify, far less to replace, all our existing anti-rational memes.”
– David Deutsch, written 1994, published 2023, The evolution of culture
“[F]rom the point of view of a static culture, all variants of existing memes are dangerous (i.e. they threaten to change the culture). The most straightforward way of increasing the fidelity of transmission is to suppress the expression of variant memes, i.e. to suppress dissent and deviation from cultural norms of behaviour. Thus every static culture has its own version of a secret police, or an Inquisition, or a headmaster, whose task is to prevent change in the culture’s constitutive memes.”
– David Deutsch, written 1994, published 2023, The evolution of culture
“One universal constructor, just like a universal computer, is perfectly obedient. It is obedient. Humans are disobedient. You need the disobedient things to program the obedient things.”
– David Deutsch, 2023, on the Tim Ferris podcast #662
“Creativity is disobedience. By not recognising that—by suppressing disobedience—you’re suppressing creativity—always (apart from mass murderers or something. But even then, it’s only the actions of criminals that have to be suppressed. Their ideas are best dealt with in non-violent ways.).”
– David Deutsch, 2023, on the Arjun Khemani podcast | YouTube
“I once heard a former Public-School pupil remark: ‘The purpose of a Public School is to cause distinctive scars, by which its inmates will be recognisable for the rest of their lives’.”
– David Deutsch, 2023, The evolution of culture, written March 1994, first published 6th December 2023, on the Taking Children Seriously website here
“[T]he common theme behind many parents’ more generalised fears of what television or the internet or hanging out with unsuitable friends might do to their children [is] a fear that what they learn under their own control might make them uncontrollable.
They may get ideas.”
– David Deutsch, 2000, ‘In praise of ignorance’, Taking Children Seriously 31, ISSN 1351-5381, pp. 10-13
“[C]hildren have always been told, ‘Because I say so.’ Although that is not always intended as a philosophical position, it is worth analysing it as one, for in four simple words it contains remarkably many themes of false and bad philosophy. First, it is a perfect example of bad explanation: it could be used to ‘explain’ anything. Second, one way it achieves that status is by addressing only the form of the question and not the substance: it is about who said something, not what they said. That is the opposite of truth-seeking. Third, it reinterprets a request for true explanation (why should something-or-other be as it is?) as a request for justification (what entitles you to assert that it is so?), which is the justified-true-belief chimera. Fourth, it confuses the nonexistent authority for ideas with human authority (power)—a much-travelled path in bad political philosophy. And, fifth, it claims by this means to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism.”
– David Deutsch, 2011, The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 12: A Physicist’s History of Bad Philosophy
“It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.”
– David Deutsch, 2011, The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 13: Choices
“Throughout our Galaxy and the multiverse, stellar evolution depends on whether and where intelligent life has evolved, and if so, on the outcomes of its wars and on how it treats its children.”
– David Deutsch, 1997, The Fabric of Reality, Chapter 8: The significance of life, p. 185
“[O]ne cannot predict the future of the Sun without taking a position on the future of life on Earth, and in particular on the future of knowledge. The colour of the Sun ten billion years hence depends on gravity and radiation pressure, on convection and nucleosynthesis. It does not depend at all on the geology of Venus, the chemistry of Jupiter, or the pattern of craters on the Moon. But it does depend on what happens to intelligent life on the planet Earth. It depends on politics and economics and the outcomes of wars. It depends on what people do: what decisions they make, what problems they solve, what values they adopt, and on how they behave towards their children.”
– David Deutsch, 1997, The Fabric of Reality, Chapter 8: The significance of life, pp. 184-185
“[O]nce we understand that the growth of human knowledge is a physical process, we see that it cannot be illegitimate to try to explain how and why it occurs. Epistemology is a theory of (emergent) physics. It is a factual theory about the circumstances under which a certain physical quantity (knowledge) will or will not grow. The bare assertions of this theory are largely accepted. But we cannot possibly find an explanation of why they are true solely within the theory of knowledge per se. In that narrow sense, Popper was right. The explanation must involve quantum physics, the Turing principle and, as Popper himself stressed, the theory of evolution.”
– David Deutsch, 1997, The Fabric of Reality, Chapter 13: The four strands, p. 341
“[E]rror is unavoidable in the growth of knowledge. So, we’re capable of creating an explosion of new knowledge, but we can only do it by making lots of errors on the way.”
– David Deutsch
“Some people’s view of education is … that one is making the child’s mind into what one thinks it ought to be. But if that were the case, there would never be any progress, because children would be just like their parents, and students would be just like their professors.”
– David Deutsch, quoted in Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1996, Taking Children Seriously 21: Creativity and Untidiness
“[A] scientist’s study—with its papers and other resources in a certain configuration—is an extension of his mind. So just as academic freedom is necessary for progress in science, freedom of thought in the wider sense—including the freedom to dispose one’s working environment in the way one chooses—is equally essential. Children’s lives and ‘work’ are automatically integrated (except when forcibly separated by school and suchlike), because their lives consist of learning. So if you intrude into their bedroom, which is usually the only private space they have, you are intruding into their minds. Then they will not be able to learn to use that space creatively, and the development of their creativity will be disabled. Being forced to enact someone else’s idea about the disposition of one’s working environment is tantamount to enacting someone else’s idea of what one’s mind should be.”
– David Deutsch, quoted in Sarah Fitz-Claridge, 1996, Taking Children Seriously 21, Creativity and Untidiness
“It is one of my rules in life not to believe a man who may happen to tell me that he feels no interest in children.”
– Charles Dickens, Feb. 9, 1858, Speech in London
“It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.”
– Benjamin Disraeli, 1839, in a speech in the House of Commons, quoted in Hansard, 20th June 1839, Volume 48, Col 580
“A mother, father, and their seven-year-old daughter were seated in a restaurant. The waitress first took the order from the adults, and, then, she turned to the little girl. ‘What will you have?’ she asked. The little girl looked timidly at her parents and, then, said to the waitress, ‘I’ll have a hot dog on a bun.’
‘No hot dog,’ said her mother. ‘She’ll have a nice piece of roasted chicken.’
‘With mashed potatoes and vegetables,’ added her father.
The waitress kept looking straight at the little girl and she asked, ‘Would you like ketchup or mustard on your hot dog?’
‘Mustard, please,’ replied the girl.
‘Coming right up,’ said the waitress, as she headed toward the kitchen. The family sat in stunned silence.
Finally, the little girl looked at her parents and said, ‘You know what? She thinks that I am real!’”
– Rabbi Wayne Dosick, 1995, Golden Rules, p. 11
“I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture. Having received in advance from the Russky Viestnick so much money . . . (Horror! 4500 roubles)…”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1868, Letter to Apollon Nicolayevich Maikov, 12th January 1868, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1923, Dostoyevsky: Letters and Reminiscences, by translated by S. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry, pp. 19-20
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations D’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/