This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education." - Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams
"Education is to get where you can start to learn." - George Aiken, fully George David Aiken
"Education should be a way of making inquiring minds inquire. Students enter school as question marks but in too many schools they leave as periods. We must teach them to imagine, to train their memories." - Sandy Andron, born Alexander Andron
"Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer - into selflessness which links us with all humanity." - Nancy Astor, fully Lady Nancy Witcher Astor, Viscountess Astor
"A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job." - Caroline Bird
"Your greatness is measured by your kindness - Your education and intellect by your modesty - Your ignorance is betrayed by your suspicions and prejudices - Your real caliber is measured by the consideration and tolerance you have for others." - William J. H. Boetcker, fully William John Henry Boetcker
"You should have education enough so that you won't have to look up to people; and then more education so that you will be wise enough not to look down on people." - M. L. Boren
"The goal of all education, preaching, and instruction is the development of mature individuals who will understand that difficulties in life are Divine-ordained challenges to overcome and opportunities for growth, and not excuses for defeat and self-ruination." - Aaron M. Brafman
"What education does is to put a series of filters over your awareness so that year by year... you experience less and less." - Norman O. Brown, fully Norman Oliver Brown
"You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." - Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL
"Counsel and conversation is a good second education, that improves all the virtues and corrects all the vices." - Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon
"American education needs training for character." - Seymour Cohen, fully Seymour Jay Cohen
"The essence of all education is self-discovery and self-control. When education helps an individual to discover his own powers and limitations and, shows him how to get out of his heredity its largest and best possibilities, it will fulfill its real function, when children are taught not merely to know things but particularly to know themselves, not merely how to do things but especially how to compel themselves to do things, they may be said to be really educated. For this sort of education there is demanded rigorous discipline of the powers of observation, of the reason, and especially of the will." - William Congreve
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
"Education as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process." - John Dewey
"Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing." - Ilya Ehrenburg, fully Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg
"We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues." - William H. P. Faunce
"It is not from nature, but from education and habits, that our wants are chiefly derived." - Henry Fielding
"An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
"Education begins with life. Before we are aware the foundations of character are laid, and subsequent teaching avails but little to remove or alter them... If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin
"The educability of a young person as a rule comes to an end when sexual desire breaks out in its final strength. Educators know this and act accordingly; but perhaps they will yet allow themselves to be influenced by the results of psycho-analysis so that they will transfer the main emphasis in education to the earliest years of childhood, from the suckling period onward. The little human being is frequently a finished product in his fourth or fifth year, and only gradually reveals in later years what lies buried in him." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Head knowledge is good, but heart knowledge is indispensable. The training of the hands and feet must be added to make a rounded education. We must all learn these days to become spiritual pioneers if we would save the world from chaos." - Evey Hammond
"The awakening of our best sympathies, the cultivation of our best and purest tastes, strengthening the desire to be useful and good, and directing youthful ambition to unselfish ends, such are the objects of true education." - J. T. Headley, fully Joel T. Headley
"The secret of all success is to know how to deny yourself. Prove that you can control yourself, and you are an educated man; and without this all other education is good for nothing... To you self-denial may only mean weariness, restraint, ennui; but it means, also, love, perfection, sanctification." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
"Education in its widest sense includes everything that exerts a formative influence, and causes a young person to be, at a given point, what he is." - Mark Hopkins
"The first thing education teaches you is to walk alone." - Trader Horn, fully Alfred Aloysius "Trader" Horn, born Alfred Aloysius Smith, alias Zambezi Jack
"Curiosity, or the love of knowledge, has a very limited influence, and requires youth, leisure, education, genius and example to make it govern any person." - David Hume
"The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values." - William Ralph Inge
"Nature... is frugal in her operations and will not be at the expense of a particular instinct to give us that knowledge which experience and habit will soon produce. Reproduced sights and contacts tied together with the present sensation in the unity of a thing with a name, these are complex objective stuff out of which my actually perceived table is made. Infants must go through a long education of the eye and ear before they can perceive the realities which adults perceive. Every perception is an acquired perception." - William James
"There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way." - William James
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." - Thomas Jefferson
"In every adult there lurks a child - an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
""Every fault of the mind becomes more conspicuous and more guilty in proportion to the rank of the offender" - Persons in high station are not only answerable for their own conduct, but for the example they may hold out to others. This, joined to their advantages of education, aggravates their vices and loads them with a greater share of responsibility." - Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL
"The highest result of education is tolerance." - Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
"Education is not a process that continues for some years and then ends. Education has only one sovereign purpose: to prepare one for more education. All else is subsidiary to this. Education should create hungers - spiritual, moral, and aesthetic hungers for value... The gift of education will be a heart that is whole." - Israel Knox
"We are raised on comparison; our education is based on it; so is our culture. So we struggle to be someone other than who we are." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top." - Eda J. LeShan
"What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the whole human race... Education gives man nothing which he could not also get from within himself; it gives him that which he could get form within himself, only quicker and more easily. In the same way too, revelation gives nothing to the human race which reason could not arrive at on its own; only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things sooner." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
"Too much attention has been paid to making education attractive by smoothing the path as compared with inducing strenuous voluntary effort." - Abbott Lawrence Lowell
"A wise system of education will at least teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn." - John Lubbock, fully Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury
"There is only one sound method of moral education. It is teaching people to think." - Everett Dean Martin
"The God-given rights of parents are not understood or are ignored by our secularist educators and by many school administrators who, in the delusion of sovereignty, act as though they, not the parents, have complete control of the education of the child." - John T. McNicholas, fully John Timothy McNicholas
"The habit of saving is itself an education; it fosters every virtue, teaches self-denial, cultivates the sense of order, trains to forethought, and so broadens the mind." - Theodore T. Munger
"Help your children understand that excellence in education cannot be achieved without intellectual and moral integrity coupled by hard work and commitment." - National Commission on Excellence in Education NULL
"Character development is the great, if not the sole, aim of education." - William James O'Shea
"The end and aim of all education is the development of character." - Francis Wayland Parker
"Education means drawing forth from the mind latent powers and developing them, so that in mature years one may apply these powers not merely to success in one's occupation, but to success in the greatest of all arts - the art of living." - William Lyon Phelps