I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there’s no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics.

Libraries raised me.

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

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

A BMW can’t take you as far as a diploma.

My mother always wanted to give back.

I’ll bring my grits when I travel, because I get so hungry on the road.

I love traveling all over the world; but it’s true: there’s nothing like home.

My father worked for a children’s home called Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. They’re a charity.

I doubt anyone else would have travelled as extensively as I have to meet the citizens of the country.

I’m always happy to blow up any misconceptions that people have about stage school cos everyone thinks it’s really nasty there but it’s not.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

I’m touring the world, not doing nothing against the law, getting money to feed my family. I got employees that have felonies, and they can’t get jobs. They work for me.

You just feel a little odd when you don’t get your kind of food. Fortunately, there are Indian restaurants all over the world.

I have wanted to fly into space for many years, but never imagined it would really be feasible.

They know enough who know how to learn.

To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

No matter what happens on the field, getting an education makes you a winner.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

Nature has always had more force than education.

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.

If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

We wanted to step off our island and add the color of the third world. We got gold cigarette paper and stuck it around our teeth. We really did look like pirates and dressed to look the part.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

What’s fascinating is, people in Washington would rather spend time in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood would rather spend time in Washington.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.

If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

I think I’ve got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn’t read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

I once went on the most grueling radio tour. Living in hotel rooms, sleeping in the backs of rental cars as my mom drove to three different cities in one day.

I’m one of the most adaptable guys I know in as much as travelling is my favourite thing to do in life. With every place I go, I try to stay there long enough to do it justice, long enough so that I can at least imagine what it would be like to live there. Once I imagine that, then it’s OK for me to return home.

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

I am a good listener. I think that came from my schooling.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.