Education+Quotes

1. "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind." –Henry James 2. I disagree with what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it. –Attrib. Voltaire 3. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." –Benjamin Franklin 4. Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. -B.F. Skinner 5. Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them. –Jerome S. Bruner 6. Education costs money, but then so does ignorance. –Sir Moser Claus 7. Education is a necessity, it helps to understand life. –Jacques Roumain 8. Education is the point at which we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new—but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. –Hannah Arendt 9. Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it. –Marian Wright Edelman 10. General education is the best preventive of the evils now most dreaded. In the civilized countries of the world, the question is how to distribute most generally and equally the property of the world. As a rule, where education is most general the distribution of property is most general.... As knowledge spreads, wealth spreads. To diffuse knowledge is to diffuse wealth. To give all an equal chance to acquire knowledge is the best and surest way to give all an equal chance to acquire property. –Rutherford B. Hayes 11. Awareness need never remain superficial in an educated man, whereas unawareness is certain to be ignorance probably compounded by arrogance. –National Conference on Higher Education 12. A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing. –Laurent A. Daloz 13. I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. –Jane Austen 14. Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don’t come into the world. –Karl Kraus 15. If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind? –Maria Montessori 16. A good education is another name for happiness. –Ann Plato 17. Education is the established church of the United States. It is one of the religions that Americans believe in. It has its own orthodoxy, its pontiffs and its noble buildings. –Michael Sadler 18. Teenagers go to college to be with their boyfriends and girlfriends; they go because they can’t think of anything else to do; they go because their parents want them to and sometimes because their parents don’t want them to; they go to find themselves, or to find a husband, or to get away from home, and sometimes even to find out about the world in which they live. –Harold Howe II 19. We need programs that will teach athletes how to //spell// “jump shot” rather than how to shoot it. –Larry Hawkins 20. The aim of education is to fit children for the position in life which they are hereafter to occupy. Boys are to be sent out into the world to buffet with its temptations, to mingle with bad and good, to govern and direct.... girls are to dwell in quiet homes, amongst a few friends; to exercise a noiseless influence, to be submissive and retiring. There is no connection between the bustling mill-wheel life of a large school and that for which they are supposed to be preparing.... to educate girls in crowds is to educate them wrongly. –Elizabeth Missing Sewell 21. The proper education of poor children [is] the ground-work of almost every other kind of charity.... Without this foundation first laid, how much kindness ... is unavoidably cast away? –Lawrence Sterne 22. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. –Ralph Waldo Emerson 23. ... in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment ... –Mary Wollstonecraft 24. If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it. –Samuel Richardson 25. Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave. –Henry Peter 26. 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. –James Baldwin 27. Girls, get an education and escape slavery. -Rena Rietveld Verduin 28. Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody. –Jane Austen 29. The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. –Jean Piaget 30. The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight. –Harold Rosenberg 31. At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisition of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him. -Central Advisory Council for Education 32. The training and education of the girl of the present have seldom been discussed except from one standpoint—her suitable preparation for becoming an economical housekeeper, an inexpensive wife, a willing and self-forgetful mother, a cheap, unexacting, patient, unquestioning, unexpectant, ministering machine. The girl’s usefulness to herself, to her sex and race, her preferences, tastes, happiness, social, intellectual or financial prosperity, hardly have entered into the thought upon this question. –Ruth C.D. Ravens 33. Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some ... real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community. –Rutherford B. Hayes 34. Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate. –Sarah M. Grimke 35. Ignorance is a //right//! Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us. –Christopher Andreae 36. Everyone knows a good deal about one child—himself. –Dora Chaplin 37. The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants. –Laurent A. Daloz 38. Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both. –Samuel Johnson 39. ... the physical and domestic education of daughters should occupy the principal attention of mothers, in childhood: and the stimulation of the intellect should be very much reduced. –Catherine E. Beecher 40. Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare. –Horace Walpole 41. Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying. –Gustave Flaubert 42. I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head. –Karl Kraus 43. The first rule of education for me was discipline. Discipline is the keynote to learning. Discipline has been the great factor in my life. I discipline myself to do everything—getting up in the morning, walking, dancing, exercise. If you won’t have discipline, you won’t have a nation. We can’t have permissiveness. When someone comes in and says, “Oh, your room is so quiet,” I know I’ve been successful. –Rose Hoffman 44. The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny. –Norman Cousins 45. The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. -Aristotle 46. 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. –Horace Mann 47. In Rousseau’s view (1762). . . most of the problems of education are problems of motivation, as teachers try to rush things. They talk of geography before the child knows the way around his own backyard. They teach history before the child understand anything about adult motivation. . . . It would be far better, to let questions arise naturally. . . . When a child is self-motivated, the teacher cannot keep him from learning. 48. If you complain of neglect of education in sons, what shall I say with regard to daughters, who every day experience the want of it? With regard to the education of my own children, I find myself soon out of my depth, destitute and deficient in every part of education. I most sincerely wish ... that our new Constitution may be distinguished for encouraging learning and virtue. If we mean to have heroes, statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women. –Abigail Adams 49. 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. It’s knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it’s knowing how to use the information you get. –William Feather 50. I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence. –Jerome S. Bruner 51. We have not been fair with the Negro and his education. He has not had adequate or ample education to permit him to qualify for many jobs that are open to him. –Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) 52. Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb. –Lyndon Baines Johnson 53. Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly. –Thomas Henry Huxley 54. By the “mud-sill” theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly.... Free labor insists on universal education. –Abraham Lincoln 55. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul. –Joseph Addison 56. Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority. –Rutherford B. Hayes 57. Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there’s no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds. –Tallulah Bankhead 58. That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. –Thomas Henry Huxley 59. Every day care center, whether it knows it or not, is a school. The choice is never between custodial care and education. The choice is between unplanned and planned education, between conscious and unconscious education, between bad education and good education. –James L. Hymes, Jr. 60. Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends. –Benjamin Disraeli 61. A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people. While we have class and sectarian schools the parties supporting them will not give their fullest aid toward building up the public school system. If all of the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money and energies on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals. To be a success a republic must have a homogeneous people, and to do this it must have homogeneous schools.... I grow more and more opposed to [sectarian schools]. –Susan B. Anthony 62. There must be a profound recognition that parents are the first teachers and that education begins before formal schooling and is deeply rooted in the values, traditions, and norms of family and culture. –Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot 63. Once I had a professor say to me, “You know you have as much education as a lot of white people.” I answered, “Doctor, I have more education than most white people.” –Dr. Jocelyn Elders 64. But of all the views of this law [universal education] none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. –Thomas Jefferson 65. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. –H.G. Wells 66. Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more people know,—the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation,—the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action. –Elizabeth Cady Stanton 67. Grandmothers are to life what the Ph.D. is to education. There is nothing you can feel, taste, expect, predict, or want that the grandmothers in your family do not know about in detail. –Lois Wyse 68. ’T is education forms the common mind: Just as the twig is bent the tree ’s inclined. –Alexander Pope 69. We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education … We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse. –E.D. Hirsch, Jr. 70. Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education—if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon—all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness. –Harriet Beecher Stowe 71. Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children. Consider the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower. When I walk in the woods, I am reminded that a wise purveyor has been there before me; my most delicate experience is typified there. –Henry David Thoreau 72. I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary. –Adrienne Rich 73. Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education. –John Hersey 74. There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education. –Will Rogers 75. To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education. –John Ruskin 76. Of all the errors which can possibly be committed to the education of youth, that of sending them to Europe is the most fatal. I see [clearly] that no American should come to Europe under 30 years of age. –Thomas Jefferson 77. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. –Earl Warren, CJ USSC, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka 78. The basic purpose of a liberal arts education is to liberate the human being to exercise his or her potential to the fullest. –Barbara M. White 79. Failure is a better teacher if a harsher mistress than success. –Michael Melosh 80. It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree. –John F. Kennedy 81. One current reaction to change in families, for example, is the proposal for more “education for parenthood,” on the theory that this training will not only teach specific skills such as how to change diapers or how to play responsively with toddlers, but will raise parents’ self-confidence at the same time. The proposed cure, in short, is to reform and educate the people with the problem. –Kenneth Keniston 82. Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it. –Stephen Vizinczey 83. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. –Thomas Jefferson 84. I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great. –Michel de Montaigne 85. You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society. –Doris Lessing