Dialogic Quotes

“To be American is to be part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. Although America is a romantic project in which a paradise, a land of dreams, is fanned and fueled with a religion of vast possibility, it is, more fundamentally, a fragile experiment-precious yet precarious-of dialogical and democratic human endeavor that yields forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history. From Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Muhammad, Geronimo to Dorothy Day, Jane Adams to Nathaniel West, it holds out the possibility of self-transformation and self-reliance to New World dwellers willing to start anew and recast themselves for the purpose of deliverance and betterment. This purpose requires only a restlessness, energy and boldness that galvanizes people to organize and mobilize themselves in a way that makes new opportunities and possibilities credible and worth the”

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”

“Having been an educator for so many years I know that all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students.”

“What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.”