This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men." - Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
"Education is a social process... Education is growth... Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself." - John Dewey
"I believe that... education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living... all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race... Every thinker puts one portion of an apparently stable world in peril." - John Dewey
"It is in education more than anywhere else that we have sincerely striven to carry into execution "the Great American Dream": the vision of a longer and fuller life for the ordinary man, a life of widened freedom, of equal opportunity for each to make of himself all that he is capable of becoming." - John Dewey
"The aim of education should be to teach the child to think, not what to think." - John Dewey
"The result of the educative process is capacity for further education." - John Dewey
"Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins." - Isaac D'Israeli
"Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school." - Albert Einstein
"The aim of education must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problem." - Albert Einstein
"The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement." - Charles W. Eliot
"The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement." - Robert Eliot
"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army." - David Everett
"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. If we retrench the wages of the schoolmaster, we must raise those of the recruiting sergeant." - Edward Everett
"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 at the repression of faults rather than creation of virtues." - William P. Faunce
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it." - William Feather
"All the value of education rests in the respect for the physical, intellectual and moral will of the child." - Francisco Ferrer y Guardia
"Education is the process by which the individual relates himself to the universe, gives himself citizenship in the changing world, shares the race's mind and enfranchises his own soul." - John Huston Finley
"Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat." - Martin Henry Fischer
"Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education" - Abraham Flexner
"Education... should concern itself primarily... with the liberation, organization, and direction of power and intelligence, with the development of taste, with culture." - Abraham Flexner
"Getting education is like getting measles; you have to go where the measles is." - Abraham Flexner
"Nations... borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both." - Abraham Flexner
"Innately, children seem to have little true realistic anxiety. They will run along the brink of water, climb on the window sill, play with sharp objects and with fire, in short, do everything that is bound to damage them and to worry those in charge of them, that is wholly the result of education; for they cannot be allowed to make the instructive experiences themselves." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least." - David Gardner, fully David Pierpont Gardner
"How to teach rigor while preserving imagination is an unsolved challenge to education." - Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard
"The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce." - Virginia Gildersleeve, fully Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve
"The true greatness and the true happiness of a country consist in wisdom; in that enlarged an comprehensive wisdom which includes education, knowledge, religion, virtue, freedom, with every influence which advances and every institution which supports them." - Henry Giles
"One of the chief objects of education should be to widen the windows through which we view the world." - Arnold Henry Glasgow
"Politicians... rise predominantly from... the "lower middle class"; most are self-made men... ; most depend on their political jobs for their livelihood and most have little time, inclination, or opportunity for adult education; hence the dominating qualities of so many are greed, vulgarity, attention to special interest, avarice, and selfishness." - John Gunther
"I regard it as the foremost task of education to insure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and, above all, compassion." - Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
"But it is not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work. That is always boring in the long run, and it has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is ever laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is to be educated." - Edith Hamilton
"The time may be coming when we will have to start accepting the idea that education is life, not merely a preparation for it." - Seymour E. Harris
"What has become of the descendants of the irresponsible adventurers, the scapegrace sons, the bond servants, the redemptionists and the indentured maidens, the undesirables, and even the criminals, which made up, not all, of course, but nevertheless a considerable part of, the earliest emigrants to these virgin countries? They have become the leaders of the thought of the world, the vanguard in the march of progress, the inspirers of liberty, the creators of national prosperity, the sponsors of universal education and enlightenment." - William Randolph Hearst
"Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend." - Jascha Heifetz
"A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he is born." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"To behold is not necessarily to observe, and the power of comparing and combining is only to be obtained by education. It is much to be regretted that habits of exact observation are not cultivated in our schools; to this deficiency may be traced much of the fallacious reasoning and the false philosophy which prevails." -
"Poverty curtails individual freedom. So do illiteracy, prejudice, lack of education, inability to obtain the basic needs of life." - Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey
"The first quality of a good education is good manners - and some people flunk the course." - Hubert Humphrey, fully Hubert Horatio Humphrey
"How can man be intelligent, happy, or useful, without the culture and discipline of education? It is this that unlocks the prison-house of his mind, and releases the captive." - George Mogridge, aka "Old Humphrey"
"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." - Robert Hutchins, fully Robert Maynard Hutchins
"Education: To be at home in all lands and ages; to count Nature as a familiar acquaintance and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to carry the keys of the world's library in one's pocket, and feel its resources behind one in whatever task he undertakes; to make hosts of friends among the men of one's own age who are the leaders in all walks of life; to lose oneself in general enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common ends." - William De Witt Hyde
"The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the god who made us has endowed us." - Anna Jameson