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Myles Horton Biography

Myles Falls Horton (July 9, 1905 – January 19, 1990) was an American educator, socialist and cofounder of the Highlander Folk School, famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement (Movement leader James Bevel called Horton "The Father of the Civil Rights Movement"). Horton taught and heavily influenced most of the era's leaders. They included Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks (who studied with Horton shortly before her decision to keep her seat on the Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955), John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy, John B. Thompson, and many others.

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Myles Horton Quotes

Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.

Information, Intelligent, Nonviolent, Practice, Struggle

I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies.

Consistencies, Consistency, Inconsistencies, Inconsistency, Proud

You can't be a revolutionary, you can't want to change society if you don't love people, there's no point in it.

Change, Love, People, Revolutionary, Want

I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.

Ease, Ideas, Mistake, Right, Thinking, Use

I’m much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don’t work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.

Come, Ideas, Tentative, Thinking, Work Out, Working

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.

Childhood, Think, Thinking, Work Out, Works

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition.

Giving, Legality, People, Structures, Things, Thinking

Nothing will change until we change - until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves.

Act, Change, Dependence, Nothing, Throw

I also knew that if people have a position on something and you try to argue them into changing it, you’re going to strengthen that position. If you want to change people’s ideas, you shouldn’t try to convince them intellectually. What you need to do is get them into a situation where they’ll have to act on ideas not argue about them.

Change, Changing, Ideas, People, Trying

Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they're already together and you try to keep from destroying life by segmenting it, overorganizing it and dehumanizing it. You try to keep things together. The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas.

Dehumanizing, Ideas, Think, Thinking, Trying

You can padlock a building, but you can't padlock an idea.

Building, Idea, Ideas, Padlock, Padlocks

I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first.

Education, People, Technique, Techniques, Think, Thinking

If you only try to do the things where you win, then you'll never try to do anything worth doing.

Struggle, Things, Trying, Win, Winning, Worth