We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

I am pro-education. I’m just anti the system.

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‚r‘, except at the beginning of a word.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

Nobody’s ever said that pins are a tool of diplomacy.

Education is the best provision for old age.

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‚This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.‘ And then we can talk.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Smiles are the language of love.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

It’s pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

I’ve always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I’ve heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

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

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

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

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

I am not one who – who flamboyantly believes in throwing a lot of words around.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

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

As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn’t have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.

Y’all are so cute and y’all talk so proper over here. I love England.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

If you can’t move and talk to people that you see, it’s not really my scene.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader – or any person – in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

I was a disadvantaged child from a non-educated family, yet I had the advantage of being in the company of great teachers.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

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.

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.

Educate the masses, elevate their standard of intelligence, and you will certainly have a successful nation.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.

‚Good English‘ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

You have to stay in school. You have to. You have to go to college. You have to get your degree. Because that’s the one thing people can’t take away from you is your education. And it is worth the investment.

I’ve known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that’s so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn’t you take university courses throughout your entire life?