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

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

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.

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that changed their abortion laws before Roe are not going to change back. So we have a policy that only affects poor women, and it can never be otherwise.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

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

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

I love diversity.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.

Here’s what I’ve learned about deal-breakers. If you have enough natural chemistry with someone, you overlook every single thing that you said would break the deal.

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?

Libraries raised me.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

To like an individual because he’s black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn’t white.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

Nature has always had more force than education.

God tells us not to judge one another, no matter what anyone’s sexual preferences are or if they’re black, brown or purple.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world, especially in my field.

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

We go to school to learn to work hard for money. I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them.

I’ve worked with children all my life.

Every wall is a door.

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.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

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

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.

The giving of love is an education in itself.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

I think a role model is a mentor – someone you see on a daily basis, and you learn from them.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.