Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.

Henry David Thoreau

Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.

Henry David Thoreau

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing.

Henry David Thoreau

On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

Henry David Thoreau

We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.

Henry David Thoreau

We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man.

Henry David Thoreau

I am still a learner, not a teacher, feeding somewhat omnivorously, browsing both stalk & leaves

Henry David Thoreau

We boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our find schoolhouse standing in a cow-yard at last.

Henry David Thoreau

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

Henry David Thoreau

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

Henry David Thoreau

To inherit property is not to be born - it is to be still-born, rather.

Henry David Thoreau

We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.

Henry David Thoreau

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

Henry David Thoreau

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Henry David Thoreau

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

H. L. Mencken

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

H. L. Mencken

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

H. L. Mencken

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No-it is Robinson Crusoe.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We can never put ourselves in the shoes of children; we cannot fathom their thoughts, we lend them ours; and always following ourown reasoning, we stuff their heads with extravagance and error.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. .. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind.

Jean Rostand

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

Intervention for the prevention and control of osteoporosis should comprise a combination of legislative action, educational measures, health service activities, media coverage, and individual counselling to initiate changes in behaviour.

Groucho Marx

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. ANOTHER VERSION I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ANOTHER VERSION I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book.

Harriet Harman

I'm afraid you gave up the right to pontificate on social mobility when you abolished educational maintenance allowance [EMA], trebled tuition fees and betrayed a generation of young people.

Harriet Martineau

School is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman.

Harriet Martineau

The instruction furnished is not good enough for the youth of such a country ... There is not even any systematic instruction given on political morals: an enormous deficiency in a republic.

Harriet Martineau

Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.

Harper Lee

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.