May 26, 2014

I’ve been collecting quotations since I was a child. Quotations from serious works of literature and curious articles and novels.

I have a masters degree in 20th century French and American Literature. And I’ve always loved popular culture. And now I read business and political stuff, too. I learn from all of it. And I like using quotations in my own books and workshop handouts.

Maybe you like quotations. Maybe you don’t. But I think I’ll start writing some blogs about favorite quotes. Not really “just for fun.” More like for learning.

So this blog’s quote theme? Knowledge

“Our society is more than happy to accept spin and cant because we have come to believe that all expertise is bias, that all knowledge is opinion, that every judgment is relative. I see this daily in my university classroom. Many of even my best students seem to have lost the ability to think critically about the world. They do not believe in the transformative power of knowledge because they do not believe in knowledge itself…

“[This] is built into our carefully balanced political ‘debates,’ into our news shows with equal time given to pundits from each side and into the ‘fairness’ we try to teach in schools. We need not be surprised that people have become consumers who demand the right to choose as they wish between the two equally questionable sides of every story. Neither global warming nor any other serious problem can be addressed by a society that equates willful ignorance with freedom of thought.”

[Bernard Dov Cooperman, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, Newsweek, September 3, 2007. Letter to the Editor.]

And I fear this is even worse now.

 

Filed under: Nonprofit Management

About Simone Joyaux

A consultant specializing in fund development, strategic planning, and board development, Simone P. Joyaux works with all types and sizes of nonprofits, speaks at conferences worldwide, and teaches in the graduate program for philanthropy at Saint Mary’s University, MN. Her books, Keep Your Donors and Strategic Fund Development, are standards in the field.

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