Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Robert Hutchins, fully Robert Maynard Hutchins

American Educator, Foundation Executive, Writer, Dean of Yale Law School, President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, husband of novelist Maude Hutchins

"Nature will not forgive those who fail to fulfill the law of their being. The law of human beings is wisdom and goodness, not limited acquisition."

"The truth is everywhere the same."

"Education is not to teach men facts, theories or laws, not to reform or amuse them or make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellect, teach them to think straight, if possible, but to think nevertheless."

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."

"All truths cannot be equally important. It is true that a finite whole is greater than any of its parts. It is also true, in the common-sense use of the word, that the New Haven telephone book is smaller than that of Chicago. The first truth is infinitely more fertile and significant than the second."

"A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation."

"A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered; about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals."

"College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America."

"Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes, in the nature of the case, different points of view."

"Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view."

"Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible."

"Football, fraternities, and fun have no place in the university. They were introduced only to entertain those who shouldn?t be in the university."

"It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches."

"It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts?it is to teach them to think."

"My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects."

"Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining."

"The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness."

"The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."

"The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives."

"The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed."

"The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty."

"There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism."

"This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault."

"To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect."

"We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books."

"When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away."