Digital Analogue

More King

Following up on yesterday's post:

When looking for a quote that was used in a speech, the best tactic is really just to email the speaker. This netted me the quote I liked so much from yesterday's session; from an article Martin Luther King Jr. submitted to the Morehouse Maroon Tiger in 1947:

Education must... train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

Great, huh? The quote's 55 years old and he could have said it yesterday. Actually, just go ahead and read the whole thing; it's not very long.

And on the topic of the holiday itself, I refer you to today's Frazz. Great comic strip. It's like he reads my mind sometimes.

"After that things start to deteriorate: you get into Macroeconomics (feel free to skip this if you want) with its interesting theories about things like the relationship of interest rates to unemployment which, er, seem to be disproven more often than they are proven, and after that it just gets worse and worse and a lot of econ majors switch out to Physics, which gets them better Wall Street jobs, anyway." --Joel Spolsky