I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

Education levels the playing field, allowing everyone to compete.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

When you walk into my classroom, I’m going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that’s the only way to prepare you for the real world.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‚Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?‘

Surely our job while we’re here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.

I would love to study guitar or trumpet.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.

For me, education was power.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‚them‘ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‚us.‘

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it’s not religion, but you can train through education.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

There is no sin except stupidity.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

Frivolity is inborn, conceit acquired by education.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Academic qualifications are important and so is financial education. They’re both important and schools are forgetting one of them.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

The Scoutmaster teaches boys to play the game by doing so himself.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

If you want someone to say, ‚She’s so sweet, and she’s so cute, and, honey, point your foot,‘ that’s not my school. You can go to the YMCA and have a nobody teach your kid if that’s what you want to hear.

I’ve worked with children all my life.

Each life is made up of mistakes and learning, waiting and growing, practicing patience and being persistent.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty.