You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Polygamy: An endeavour to get more out of life than there is in it.

I believe that of all the things I have done, exciting though many of them have been, there’s no doubt in my mind that the most worthwhile have been the establishing of schools and hospitals, and the rebuilding of monasteries in the mountains.

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

In our seeking for economic and political progress, we all go up – or else we all go down.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

The reason why I wear gold – I wear gold for three reasons. One, when Jesus was born, three wise men came from the east: one brought frankincense, one brought myrrh, the other one brought gold. The second reason I wear gold is I can afford it. The third reason I wear it, it’s symbolic of my African heritage.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

Temptation is just the feeling that you’re the most independent person on planet Earth. That you know everything. That’s something that we all go through as a kid. Now, this lifestyle that I’m in, the same thing exists! But it’s 10 times worse, because everything is at my disposal. When you’re in the limelight, you can get anything you want.

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

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

After two years at UCLA, I decided to leave. I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job.

If we go on your iPhone and go to the dictionary and look up ‚humble,‘ 80 per cent of the definition is negative. It’s a controlling word. It’s a way to control the masses and to control the sheep.

The wisest have the most authority.

I read poetry to save time.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

We are wiser than we know.

Society is at odds with itself.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

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.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

We cannot wish for that we know not.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

It’s amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

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.

If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained.