The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

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

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

All art is quite useless.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

For me, education was power.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

In art the best is good enough.

What I call my ‚self‘ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

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

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

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

Every artist wants something different out the game.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

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.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

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

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Everybody who makes any kind of policy needs to substitute teach. But you’ve got to be a real teacher. You can’t just go to a couple of classes with the regular teacher there. It is an incredibly hard job.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

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 never called my work an ‚art‘. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.

I create stars.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

Knowledge is power.

In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

I’m not really book-smart.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.