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.

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

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

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

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

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.

Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.

I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Studies have identified a significant ‚skills gap‘ between what students are currently being taught and the skills employers are seeking in today’s global economy. Our children must be better prepared than they are now to meet the future challenges of our ever-changing world.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

I wasn’t very good in academics, but I could have been if I could have studied well. I was a smart kid.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don’ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

I am a big believer in education, because when I grew up in Austria – when I grew up in Austria I had a great education. I had great teachers.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

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.

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

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

Knowledge is power.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

My mother is not educated but keeps in touch with world events through news on TV.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

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.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student.

Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily… thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn’t always follow what was going on.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

I grew up around lots of men – my father, my brothers, my uncles – so I wasn’t intimidated by them.