Quote of the Day (Abraham Flexner, on Education’s Importance in Cultivating Curiosity)

“Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered. Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times.”— American educator Abraham Flexner (1866-1959), “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1939

Quote of the Day (Stephen Fry, on Incuriosity, ‘The Oddest and Most Foolish Failing’)

“There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”—British actor and author Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography (2012)

(Photo of Stephen Fry taken on June 15, 2016, at Winfield House, by the US Embassy London.)

Quote of the Day (Eleanor Roosevelt, on Being ‘Eager for Experience’)

“One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. ... All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there's one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.”—Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (1960)

Born on this day 130 years ago in New York City, Eleanor Roosevelt—partly by education, partly by acting as the indispensable partner to her polio-stricken husband—proved receptive to as extraordinary a range of experience as perhaps any First Lady has ever encountered. In the process, she forever redefined the role and limits of America’s First Ladies. Ken Burns’ great documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History detailed just how wide-ranging her influence came to be (including becoming the first First Lady to address a political convention, in 1940).

A post on the Web site of the National Archives gives just a hint of her interests by examining, from its holdings, the contents of her wallet: “a license from the state of New York to carry a pistol, an expired card to the Newspaper Guild’s Press Club in New York City, a Diner’s Club Credit Card, a health insurance card, a Bell System Credit Card with instructions on how to make a collect call, a St. Christopher card for the patron saint of travel, and an air travel card"—all indications of an astonishingly active life, maintained all the way to its end, at age 78.