“The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.”
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Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.
To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.
Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.
Iran is not a make-believe country. It is a real country populated by some 75 million people - real people including, I daresay, a majority who are philosophically and by education inclined toward the modern, secular world, and particularly American values.