My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.

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About Ellen Willis

Ellen Willis was a 20th-century American writer. Ellen Jane Willis was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic. A 2014 collection of her essays, The Essential Ellen Willis, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Education — The importance of teaching, learning, and intellectual curiosity
  • Truth — Meditations on honesty, authenticity, and the search for truth

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