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

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

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

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

To those whose talents are above mediocrity, the highest subjects may be announced. To those who are below mediocrity, the highest subjects may not be announced.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

I believe that of all the things I have done, exciting though many of them have been, there’s no doubt in my mind that the most worthwhile have been the establishing of schools and hospitals, and the rebuilding of monasteries in the mountains.

Treat your children like the blessings they are or don’t have them at all.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don’t want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

Children always turn to the light.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

Everyone has the potential to become an encourager. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to be a genius. You don’t have to have it all together. All you have to do is care about people and initiate.

Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, ‚A house guest,‘ you’re wrong because I have just described my kids.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

My mother taught children to love to dance.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

We all have limitations. I don’t have the right genes to be an Olympic weightlifter. I don’t have the right genetics to be an Olympic sprinter. Or gymnast. Sure, if I trained my whole life, perhaps I could have become fairly decent in those sports.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

Standing in support of children is something we should all be able to get behind, regardless of party affiliation.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‚Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?‘

Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

I’d like to think that I’m a calm and sweet person. I tend to be very playful at home with my children, but in life… we have to fight our battles – our work battles, our political battles, our personal battles – and we’re focused.

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon’s unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

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.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.

My children love Maleficent’s voice, so they always make me do it at home.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

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?

First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.

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

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

I need physics more than friends.

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Our diplomacy and development budget is not just about reducing spending and finding efficiencies. We need a frank conversation about what we stand for as that ‚shining city on a hill.‘ And that conversation begins by acknowledging that we can’t do it on the cheap.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.