Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Change alone is unchanging.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

I used to read five psalms every day – that teaches me how to get along with God. Then I read a chapter of Proverbs every day and that teaches me how to get along with my fellow man.

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

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

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

The U.S.S.R. had absolutely nothing to do with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don’t need another plaque.

Friendship… is not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind – this attitude of uncertainty – is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

I didn’t get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

They know enough who know how to learn.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

On the ‚Star,‘ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

Anybody who tells you that a two-day conference, you’re going to turn into the General Patton of leadership, they’re not telling you the truth. But you can learn the fundamentals; you can absolutely understand the fundamentals.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.