Famous Quotes & Sayings

Maya Lin

Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.

Maya Lin

I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.

Neal Boortz

Isn't it somewhat remarkable that we can go back a a few hundred years and find no shortage of quotations from our founding fathers warning us against the dangers of democracy, yet today teachers and politicians use the word as if it were an offering of gold.

Neal Shusterman

Once in a while our school has half days, and the teachers spend the afternoon 'in service,' which I think must be a group therapy for having to deal with us.

Natasha Trethewey

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

Madeleine L'Engle

The creative impulse can be killed, but it cannot be taught. What a teacher can do... in working with children, is to give the flame enough oxygen so that it can burn. As far as I'm concerned, this providing of oxygen is one of the noblest of all vocations.

Louis Sullivan

To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.

Louisa May Alcott

A child her wayward pencil drew On margins of her book; Garlands of flower, dancing elves, Bud, butterfly, and brook, Lessons undone, and plum forgot, Seeking with hand and heart The teacher whom she learned to love Before she knew t'was Art.

Lou Gerstner

I initially wanted to be a teacher, and then I was going to become an engineer and build bridges and highways, but pretty soon I went into the business world. I never did get to be a teacher except in a different way.

John Garrett

The job of a teacher is to excite in the young a boundless sense of curiosity about life, so that the growing child shall come to apprehend it with an excitement tempered by awe and wonder.

John F. Kennedy

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

John F. Kennedy

I think when we talk about corporal punishment, and we have to think about our own children, and we are rather reluctant, it seems to me, to have other people administering punishment to our own children, because we are reluctant, it puts a special obligation on us to maintain order and to send children out from our homes who accept the idea of discipline. So I would not be for corporal punishment in the school, but I would be for very strong discipline at home so we don't place an unfair burden on our teachers.

Jonathan Kozol

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

Jonathan Kozol

My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.

Jonathan Kozol

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

Jonathan Kozol

I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I'll feel my life has been worth it.

Jonathan Kozol

The future teachers I try to recruit are those show have refused to let themselves be neutered in this way, either in their private lives or in the lives that they intend to lead in school. When they begin to teach, they come into their classrooms with a sense of affirmation of the goodness and the fullness of existence, with a sense of satisfaction in discovering the unexpected in their students, and with a longing to surprise the world, their kids, even themselves, with their capacity to leave each place they've been ... a better and more joyful place than it was when they entered it.

Jonathan Kozol

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

Jonathan Kozol

Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.

Jonathan Kozol

Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.

Jonathan Kozol

I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers.

Jonathan Lethem

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Jonathan Edwards

Teachers and learners are correlates, one of which was never intended to be without the other.

Jonah Lehrer

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

Jon Stewart

I remember having a grade-school teacher I thought was a hard-ass. When you're that age, you think the guy is Himmler. Then you visit him eight years later and he's wearing polyester pants, he's four foot eight, you think he's gay, and you're like, 'Are you the guy I was afraid of?

Jon Stewart

I thought we were out of money!? You can't simultaneously fire teachers AND tomahawk missiles.

Joyce Carol Oates

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Katha Pollitt

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.

Katarina Witt

I started the class late. The teacher said I would have to learn as much in half a year that the others learned in a year. I did it.

Kate Beckinsale

I still feel like the person who shouldn't be doing this and everyone is acting around me as if I'm a badass all the time. And this still feels like a stretch. I realize this is something that is incredible. I get to do this and I get wonderful teachers to help me and it's amazing.

Justin Trudeau

I was a snowboard instructor, I was a bouncer in a nightclub, I was a whitewater river guide for many years. I worked as a teacher. I make no apologies for a very varied set of life experiences.

Justin Trudeau

For me, to represent people who represent the future of Canada and the great challenges we will face over the coming decades - this is where I wanted to start. ... I'm a teacher; I'm a convenor; I'm a gatherer; I'm someone who reaches out to people and is deeply interested in what they have to say. And people see that I'm not faking it. I'm actually genuinely committed to this dialogue that we're opening up, and this understanding that needs to happen in order to be an effective MP.