I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.

In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs – so the pressure to do well is really high.

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible.

I think the American people, with some justification, think that most politicians live in la-la land.

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Hate, emotionalism, and frustration are not policies.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

You don’t go to Notre Dame to learn something; you go to Notre Dame to be somebody.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I go to school the youth to learn the future.

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

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

Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn’t so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

You can stroke people with words.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn’t educate America if they started at 6:30.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

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

Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.

Nobody likes to have trouble. The moment we get a hint that it’s coming, a common response is, ‚Oh no! Not again!‘

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it’s very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‚like‘ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

We are all pleased when our names are pronounced and spelled correctly.

I went to a general store. They wouldn’t let me buy anything specifically.

‚Educational‘ refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.

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

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

They know enough who know how to learn.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?