“One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education… The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books, but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
My Day (Primary source)
Collections of Roosevelt’s syndicated newspaper column written six days weekly from 1935-1962, offering accessible, diary-like observations on daily life, politics, civil rights, and current events that reached millions of American readers.
“In the democracies of the world, the passion for freedom of speech and of thought is always accentuated when there is an effort anywhere to keep ideas away from people and to prevent them from making their own decisions. One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education and thus make it impossible for them to understand what is going on in the world as a whole.
In the case of Germany, however, the people have always had the tools of learning. They have been a highly educated nation. Hitler had to use other methods, and he chose to go back to the practices of medieval days and burn the books whose philosophies were opposed to his. He knew that if these thoughts reached the people, they might stir up unrest and opposition to his own regime.
The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books, but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. Hitler used all of these methods and gained his ends within Germany for a time. In the end, and that end seems to be drawing closer every day, the people whom Hitler has enslaved will have to come in contact again with the world of free expression and thought, then Hitler will have to face the judgment of his own people.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt Primary source“If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt Primary source“Example is the best lesson there is.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt Primary source“I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed, and had done the very best you could.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt Primary sourceMore quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt →
“Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of this war is that way.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The difference between a good software person and a great software person is fifty to one, twenty-five to fifty to one, huge dynamic range.”
— Steve Jobs Primary sourceEnslavement Education Knowledge