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.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

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.

I wanted to race cars. I didn’t like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

She’s been married so many times she has rice marks on her face.

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.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

We knew sports was important to us and our family, but there are priorities in life.Obviously, faith is foremost; how we did in school is important. If we didn’t handle that business then there were no privileges.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

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

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

Gentle dullness ever loves a joke.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It’s experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.

If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

If you’ve found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.

Someone once asked me, ‚How long does it take to do your hair.‘ I said, ‚I don’t know, I’m never there.‘

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy – entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.

You know, nothing is more important than education, because nowhere are our stakes higher; our future depends on the quality of education of our children today.

My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It’s like stealing a two-year-old.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Believe it or not, I make myself laugh. Sometimes when I have thoughts or say some things that are funny, it just makes me laugh, and I don’t mind laughing at it before you guys do.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

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.

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

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.