“We must never accept utility as the sole reason
for education. If all knowledge is of the outside, if none is turned
inward, if self-awareness fades into the blind acquiescence of the mass
[human], then the personal responsibility by which democracy lives will
fade also. Schoolrooms are not and should not be the place where [humans]
learn only scientific techniques. They
are the place where selfhood, what has been called ‘the supreme
instrument of knowledge,’ is created.
Only such deep inner knowledge truly expands our horizons and makes
use of technology, not for power, but for human happiness.
As the capacity for self-awareness is intensified, so will return
that sense of personal responsibility which has been well-nigh lost in the
eager yearning for aggrandizement of the asphalt [human]...we
are to build a stable cultural structure…a society more appreciative of
human worth than any society that has previously existed…a society more
interested in the cultivation of noble minds than in change.” (Loren
Eiseley,
The Firmament of Time, 146-7).
Among all creatures, humans are distinguished by the
extent to which they wonder about things that do not immediately affect
their subsistence.
-Lewis Carroll Epstein
Time is at the heart of all that is important to
human beings.
-Bernard d’Espagnat
What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it
is. If I wish to explain it
to him who asks me, I do not know.
-St. Augustine
Time is the mediator between the possible and the
actual.
-G. J. Whitrow
Any repetitive phenomenon whatever, the recurrences
of which can be counted, is a measure of time.
-G. M. Clemence
We still cannot say what time is; we cannot agree
whether there is one time or many times, cannot even agree whether time is
an essential ingredient of the universe or whether it is a grand illusion
of the human intellect.
-Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh
If a man does not keep pace with his
companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer (intended to
comment on a society regulated by the clock)
-Thoreau, Walden, cited in Levine, Geography of Time, 52
I
know you can’t put the clock back.
But there is one thing you can do.
You can stop that clock. You
can smash that clock.
-Nathanael West, A Cool Million, cited in Levine, Geography of Time, 52
