Only the educated are free.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

The proper study of mankind is books.

You have enough people against you… be for yourself.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

Woman was God’s second mistake.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

We do not need the empire to give us anything.

The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

To lead people walk behind them.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

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

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‚Ich bin ein Berliner!‘

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

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

No matter what happens on the field, getting an education makes you a winner.

There’s something about death that is comforting. The thought that you could die tomorrow frees you to appreciate your life now.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

I’m not intimidated by how people perceive me.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.