Sam Wineburg Quotes

“History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.”

“History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.”

“I have found that life has been a balanced road that continues to be obscured by the dust of prejudice and dangerous extremes; good and evil, law and chaos, faith and logic, love and hate, greed and sacrifice...For the human creature, that permanency is simply a reliving of earth and pain.”

“Our mind is a garden, our thoughts are the seeds. We can grow flowers or we can grow weeds. Don't forget to water it!”

“If you believe you can, you can; if you believe you can't, you can't.”

“Slowly the truth is loadingI'm weighted down with loveSnow lying deep and evenStrung out and dreaming ofNight falling on the cityQuite something to beholdDon't it just look so prettyThis disappearing worldWe're threading hope like fireDown through the desperate bloodDown through the trailing wireInto the leafless woodNight falling on the cityQuite something to beholdDon't it just look so prettyThis disappearing worldThis disappearing worldI'll be sticking right there with itI'll be by your sideSailing like a silver bulletHit 'em 'tween the eyesThrough the smoke and rising waterCross the great divideBaby till it all feels rightNight falling on the citySparkling red and goldDon't it just look so prettyThis disappearing world"~David Gray”

“The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view….”

“want to live like there's no tomorrow. Love like I'm on borrowed time. It's good to be alive." ~ Musician Jason Gray”

“The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray - one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.”

“The truth is usually somewhere in the gray turbulent eddies set in motion by the mixture of black and white.”

“Putting some 'gray in play,' as Chad referred to it, always helped. HE said the act of rationalizing the pros and cons helped to cloud the issues enough to avoid a moral quandary. It allowed us to believe the ends justified the means. Seeing gray helped to remove the black-and-white, right and wrong ethical choices.. . Had I become so jaded in my life that I had actually forgotten the difference between right and wrong? Or had I simply tried to ignore the difference so I could sleep at least two or three hours a night?”