15 Quotes by E.R. Braithwaite

So long as we learn it doesn’t matter who teaches us, does it?

A child who has slept all night in a stuffy, overcrowded room, and then breakfasts on a cup of weak tea and a piece of bread, can hardly be expected to show a sharp, sustained interest in the abstractions of arithmetic, and the unrelated niceties of correct spelling. Punishment (or the threat of it) for this lack of interest is unlikely to bring the best out of him.

Oh God, forgive me for the hateful thoughts, because I love them, these brutal, disarming bastards, I love them …

Today I was a teacher, employed. True, I was also a teacher untried, but that could also be an advantage. I would learn, by God I’d learn. Nothing was going to stop me.

Instead, we try to give them affection, confidence and guidance, more or less in that order, because experience has shown us that those are their most immediate needs.

All the big talk of Democracy and Human Rights seemed as spurious as the glib guarantees with which some manufacturers underwrite their products in the confident hope that they will never be challenged. The Briton at home takes no responsibility for the protestations and promises made in his name by British officials overseas.

He further advised me to live like a man, with dignity and not let the colour of my skin cripple my spiritual growth or social consciousness. And he told me then that our shoutings against prejudice and discrimination would be empty and meaningless until, inside ourselves, we admitted no difference between men, any men, based on the colour of their skins.

The betrayal I now felt was greater because it had been perpetrated with the greatest of charm and courtesy.

It was like a disease, and these children whom I loved without caring about their skins or their backgrounds, they were tainted with the hateful virus which attacked their vision, distorting everything that was not white or English.