Commemorate American Education Week 2007 with this excellent compilation of quotations.
Learn more about this event, celebrated from November 12–18, on this
website.
- "There are two types of education... One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live. "
-- John Adams - "Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom. "
-- John Adams - "A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance...as a comet or an earthquake."
-- John Adams - "It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
-- John Adams - " What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. "
-- Joseph Addison - " 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 - "Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character. "
-- Hosea Ballou - "The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind. "
-- Jacques Martin Barzun - "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
-- Hebrew Bible - "Education. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."
-- Ambrose Bierce - "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."
-- Allan Bloom - "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion."
-- Allan Bloom - "Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave."
-- Lord Brougham - "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. "
-- George W. Bush (on Education reform, Feb 21, 2001) - "I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught. "
-- Sir Winston Churchill - "Better build schoolrooms for "the boy" Than cells and gibbets for "the man." "
-- Eliza Cook - "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. "
-- Calvin Coolidge - "He who dares to teach must never cease to learn. "
-- Richard Henry Dann - "If I were asked to enumerate ten educational stupidities, the giving of grades would head the list... If I can't give a child a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to lock my desk and go home and stay there. "
-- Dorothy De Zouche - "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. "
-- Will Durant - "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
-- - "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- - "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. "
-- Malcolm Forbes - "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature."
-- - "Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech."
-- - "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper. "
-- Robert Frost - "I got eight O-levels at school...zero in every subject. "
-- Paul Gascoigne - "It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-- that is to be educated. "
-- Edith Hamilton - "Education is the art of making man ethical. "
-- Georg Hegel - "The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. "
-- Robert Maynard Hutchins - "Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then...do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen."
-- Lee Iacocca - "It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father."
-- Thomas Jefferson - "A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson - "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread. "
-- Thomas Jefferson - "The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present."
-- Ellen Key - "The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time. "
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti - "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which grant[s] a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-- James Madison - "I believe there are more instances of abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-- James Madison - " If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!"
-- Andy McIntyre - " Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach. "
-- H. L. Mencken - "People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed. "
-- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - "Education costs money, but then so does ignorance. "
-- Sir Claus Moser - "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt - "Let us describe the education of our men. . . . What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind. "
-- Plato - "If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people. "
-- Chinese proverb - "If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around. "
-- Jim Rohn - "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."
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - "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 - "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. "
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau - "Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it."
-- Benjamin Rush - "Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself. "
-- Friedrich Schlegel - "Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. "
-- Pete Seeger - "Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. "
-- B. F. Skinner - "Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them."
-- Baruch Spinoza - "Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. "
-- Thomas Szasz - "It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government."
-- Texas Declaration of Independence - "Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. "
-- Clarence Thomas - "Your biggest opportunity probably lies under your own feet, in your current job, industry, education, experience or interests. "
-- Brian Tracy - "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-- - "Label on a child's Superman costume: Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly. "
-- Unknown - "Education is not a form of entertainment, but a means of empowering people to take control of their lives. "
-- Unknown - "The desire to know is natural to good men. "
-- Leonardo da Vinci - "I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?"
-- Leonardo da Vinci - "Anyone who argues by referring to authority is not using his mind but rather his memory."
-- Leonardo da Vinci - "One can have no smaller or greater mastery than matery of oneself. "
-- Leonardo da Vinci - "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. "
-- H. G. Wells - "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. "
-- William Butler Yeats
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