Professor David Allen White, U.S. Naval Academy | Professor John Mark Reynolds, Biola University |
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[... page numbers came from my print-out that was 9 pages in length ...]
We need beauty in our lives. We need souls that are good, and true, and beautiful. Don't fall into the trap of thinking only things that work matter. [JMR, p3]
We can't get to good, true, and beautiful by starting with ourselves, because all of us are in process. We need great writers to help us find the big ideas, the truths that never change. [JMR, p3]
If you're ever tempted to be a socialist, the Communist Manifesto will argue you out of it. [JMR, p4]
Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Darwin: the makers of the modern mind [JMR, p4]
I view Freud as a waste of time, I view Marx as a good joke on everyone who fell for it. [HH, p5]
I wouldn't read Darwin. James Joyce - who I consider one of the big frauds of the 20th century. Joyce, Marx, Freud, Darwin: a complete waste of the gifts they were given. You can get a sense of them secondhand. [DAW, p5]
Most people call [James Joyce's] Ulysses the greatest novel of the 20th Century. The irony, of course, is that nobody's ever read it, or could read it. It's a complete and total bore. [DAW, p5]
[With Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, men] can learn something about being a man. She had a better sense of manhood than most men in our time. [HH: Can we watch the movie instead?] No, you've got to read it. The sentences are exquisite, and the wisdom of this woman is profound. [DAW, p5]
Immortal Poems of the English Language – Sidney, Spencer, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Whitman, Dickenson, Frost. [DAW, p5]
Essays – Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
tells you how people work [HH, p6]
Reflections on the Revolution in France – Edmund Burke
understand the way politics works, the way people work [JMR, p6]
I do scowl at Machiavelli. [DAW, p6]
Both of you want to understand the modern mind without reading the modern mind, so I don't know what to make of either of you. [JMR, p6]
Oedipus Rex - gets right to the question of who am I, proves to us we have no idea, and when we find out, it's pretty horrifying. [DAW, p6]
Lear is number one, to my mind, the greatest thing ever written by anybody. [DAW, p6]
Leviathan established the agenda for nearly all subsequent Western political philosophy. The word "Hobbesian" is sometimes used in modern English to refer to a situation in which there is unrestrained, selfish, and uncivilised competition. This usage, now well-established, is misleading because "Leviathan" describes such a situation, but only in order to criticise it. [Wikipedia]
I think anybody who gets near Norman Mailer gets evil diseases of the intellectual sort, and can utterly shut down and stop thinking forever. [JMR, p8]
I hear the name Calvin, and I fall on the floor and shake. [DAW, p8]
Why isn't the canon of great books taught?
We dumb down education because it's easier to be stupid than it is to be smart. These books aren't immediately fun to read, though they're fun for the rest of your life in an intellectual sense ... With a good leader, students are dying for this. [But they need a guide] to understand how to read great literature ... and as you start to help them get a hold of the real thing, they become hungry for it, with a passion that passes anything you've ever seen. Our students aren't worse than they were 100 years ago. The teachers are worse ... Adults can do this as well, but you need to find a good guide, you need to find someone who can help you get through things, and you need to understand that being bored is not a sin. Some things are hard to learn, but they're worth learning. You need to press on and try to get what you can. Repetitive reading of books is a great idea. If a book's worth reading once, it's generally worth reading multiple times. [JMR, p8]
Why isn't the canon of great books taught?
Because modern universities and colleges are the biggest fraud on the planet. They hate Western civilization, and they will do anything to destroy it, which means destroying the canon ... [Students and adults will respond to these books, but] they need some good guidance to get them through. I agree completely with the remarks that were just made. I always think, and I point to this, in the Divine Comedy, when Dante's taking his journey, he's got to have Virgil there to guide him, and then Beatrice and then St. Bernard. You've got to have a guide. [DAW, p9]