“The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.”
“A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.”
“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”
“The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.”
“Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.”
“All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.”
“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”
“Education is not a discipline at all. Half vocational, half an emptiness dressed up in garments borrowed from philosophy, psychology, literature.”
“The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.”
“The wretch who digs the mine for bread, or ploughs, that others may be fed, feels less fatigued than that decreed to him who cannot think or read.”
“The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.”
“The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
“There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.”
“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”
“Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.”
“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”
“Higher education must lead the march back to the fundamentals of human relationships, to the old discovery that is ever new, that man does not live by bread alone.”
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”
“We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educability of man-the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.”
“Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”
“There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”
“The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
“We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.”
“I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.”
“America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.”
“The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.”
“Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively.”
“We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.”
“I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.”