For my part, I desire to see the time when education – and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry – shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

Well begun is half done.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

In poor countries, we still need better ways to measure the effectiveness of the many government workers providing health services. They are the crucial link bringing tools such as vaccines and education to the people who need them most. How well trained are they? Are they showing up to work?

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?

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

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.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

I really don’t like women who try to be men. All these politicians, I think they’re horrendous. We could have a brilliant future, but we have this terrible male vision of destroying everything. They’d better sort themselves out and become more womanly.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic.

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

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

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

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.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

We have to build the capacity of our institutions, employees and workers. Our regulatory environment has not been encouraging to research, innovation and enterprise.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‚suspects.‘

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‚Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I – if I’m not interested in something, I don’t grasp it.

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.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

People like to talk about war.

When I first stopped going to high school, I was about 15, 16. It had to be, like, 2000, 2001.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

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

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

I mean, I went to a Catholic boys‘ school for a year, but that was to play hockey. Religion class was quite contentious for me.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system – at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.