Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‚Does your teacher use class time well?‘ and, ‚When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?‘

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

Because I know about the Holy Land, I’ve taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and – but you can’t bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

The highest grade I’ve taught is the 11th grade, and the youngest I’ve taught is the 4th grade.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we, as a people, can be engaged in.

It is crucial that young people are taught sustainable child production and rearing.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Connectivity enables transparency for better government, education, and health.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.