Word: instinctiveness
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Large lecture classes anaesthetize the student's aggressive instinct toward self-instruction and undercut the goals of college education. Rather than encouraging him to think and argue critically, Harvard relegates him to the role of spectator. Too often papers and tests provide his only chance to stand up for himself; but in courses where the student is not asked to participate during the term, he will more likely meet a final exam calling for systematic memorization and regurgitation than one challenging his judgement...
...self-righteousness, the belief in self, and a certain...edginess, a certain tension came over. Defensiveness. He somehow thinks that, if he lays it all out, they'll understand and they'll act--that that's the way a public leader leads. Well, that's not what the instinct of a public educator would say: you've got to keep trying to reach them...
...violence by one set of people upon another set of people that has not been perpetrated in the name of patriotism." Patriotism is both indispensable and extremely dangerous, involving always the hazards of the self being ceded to the larger purposes of the fatherland. Hitler had a sinister little instinct for patriotic sentiment. Patriotism, or a debased form of it, raucous with jingo and the bully's knuckles, has led the U.S. astray from time to time; citizens hounded German Americans during World War I, for example. They did idiotic and ominous things-fulminating that Einstein's theory...
...Secretariat waited for a telex message from Tehran that would confirm what they felt certain had been Banisadr's verbal agreement. The message finally arrived late in the day. As Waldheim read it, according to a U.N. aide who was present, he swallowed hard, suppressed an instinct to curse and "looked like a man who had been kicked in the pants." The cable mentioned nothing about the hostages and referred to the commission as though Banisadr was expecting it to hold a trial. Said the Iranian cable: "Now that the demand of the Imam Khomeini and the Iranian nation...
...asking a malignant tumor what makes it grow. It simply cannot behave otherwise. The same is true of Communism; driven by a malevolent and irrational instinct for world domination, it cannot help seizing ever more lands. Communism is something new, unprecedented in world history; it is fruitless to seek analogies. All warnings to the West about the pitiless and insatiable nature of Communist regimes have proved to be in vain because the acceptance of such a view would be too terrifying. (Did not the Afghan tragedy in fact take place two years ago? But the West shut its eyes...