Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the challenges faced by Pakistan regarding education and the consequences of a poorly educated populace.
Christopher Hitchens' quote reflects on the impact that a lack of education can have on society, particularly in Pakistan. He suggests that the export of uneducated individuals not only hampers personal and national development, but can also lead to the proliferation of dangerous and reactionary ideologies. This observation serves as a critique of systemic educational failures and warns about the broader implications for social stability and progress.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of education in national development.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.
We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.
When I am through learning, I am through.
I always tell kids, you have two eyes and one mouth. Keep two open and one closed. You never learn anything if you're the one talking.
Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized.
We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our school-masters, and one from the world. The third contradicts all that the first two teach us.
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