Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked

 --- Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (1986), p. 69

In context:

Every ten years or so classroom text books go out of date. Their need to be revised is in some part due to new work in science or to the deeper delving of historians. Much more, it is because science has come to seem over-religious or scandalously irreligious (Nelkin 1977), or because the history of the last decade gives a wrong political feeling (Fitzgerald 1979). In the intervening years, some slogans have become risible, some words have become empty, and others too full, holding too much cruelty or bitterness to modern ears. Some names count for more, and others that count for less are due to be struck out. The revisionary effort is not aimed at producing the perfect optic flat. The mirror, if that is what history is, distorts as much after revision as it did before. The aim of revision is to get the distortions to match the mood of the present times. But the mirror is a poor metaphor of the public memory. The seeker after historical truth is not trying to get a clearer image of his own face, or even a more flattering image. Conscious tinkering and remaking is only a small part of the shaping of the past. When we look closely at the construction of past time, we find the process has very little to do with the past at all and everything to do with the present. Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They make other areas show finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting

 --- Plutarch, in "On Listening"

From Plutarch, Essays, transl. Robin Waterfield, Penguin Books, p. 50 (1992), Google Books

For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting - no more - then it motivates one towards originality and instils the desire for truth.

See also On Listening to Lectures, as published in Vol. I of the Loeb Classical Library edition, transl. F. C. Babbit (1927) (uchicago.edu)

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

H/t to redditors Ctrl-C and jean-luc_gohard in a thread on r/askphilosophy.

Life is a matter of really tough choices

 --- Joe Biden, quoted by Ned Temko in Biden in Saudi Arabia: The strategy behind ‘making nice’, CSMonitor, July 13, 2022.

From the piece"

It’s a maxim coined by Joe Biden a dozen years ago, when he was still vice president. But it might just as well be emblazoned on Air Force One as he embarks on his first presidential visit to the Middle East: “Life is a matter of really tough choices.”

Back then, he was talking about a political trade-off on tax-cut legislation. Now, however, he’s had to face a much tougher choice on a larger stage: a world seismically jolted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

The result: an even more difficult, and controversial, trade-off. It’s between the emphasis on democracy and human rights he has placed at the core of his foreign policy, and his campaign to build and sustain international support to isolate Mr. Putin and deny him victory.

the proper relationship to the emerging ontology

 --- John Vervaeke, in Egregores, Mobs and Demons | with Jordan Hall & John Vervaeke, Jun 24, 2022, on Jonathan Pageau's YouTube channel, at time code 1:05:51

... how can we virtuously and with virtuosity participate in the largely virtual medium in which the kairos is presenting itself so that we can discover the proper relationship to the emerging ontology, if i can put it that way. That, to me, is the question. ...