The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that opens doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.
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A student is not a professional athlete. ... He is not a little politician or junior senator looking for angles ... an amateur promoter, a glad-hander, embryo Rotarian, caf-society leader, quiz kid or man about town. A student is a person who is learning to fulfill his powers and to find ways of using them in the service of mankind.
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Between the amateur and the professional...there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization...A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
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Sometimes the gods have no taste at all. They allow sunrises and sunsets in ridiculous pink and blue hues that any professional artist would dismiss as the work of some enthsiastic amateur who'd never looked at a real sunset. This was one of those sunrises. It was the kind of sunrise a man looks at and says, 'No real sunrise could paint the sky Surgical Appliance Pink.' Nevertheless, it was beautiful.
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The invention of IQ did a great disservice to creativity in education. ... Individuality, personality, originality, are too precious to be meddled with by amateur psychiatrists whose patterns for a 'wholesome personality' are inevitably their own.
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A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
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An amateur thinks it's really funny if you dress a man up as an old lady, put him in a wheelchair, and give the wheelchair a push that sends it spinning down a slope towards a stone wall. For a pro, it's got to be a real old lady.
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Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.
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Every artist was first an amateur.
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Every man reaps what he sows, except the amateur gardener.
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Every artist was first an amateur.
Art
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When should a college athlete turn pro? Not until he has earned all he can in college as an amateur.
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