Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"I begin by taking.
I shall find scholars later
to demonstrate my perfect right."

~ Frederick the Great  

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

~ Sir Winston Churchill  

"Believe nothing merely because you have been told it.
Do not believe what your teacher tells you
merely out of respect for the teacher.
But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis,
you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit,
the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to,
and take it as your guide."

~ Buddha  

"It seems now that the place where you see the most obvious censorship is on college campuses -- the precise place where you would expect to see the least."

~ Alan Charles Kors  

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."

~ Helen Keller  

"A university’s essential character is that
of being a center of free inquiry and criticism --
a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else."

~ Richard Hofstadter  

"The test of every religious, political,
or educational system, is the man which it forms.
If a system injures the intelligence it is bad.
If it injures the character it is vicious.
If it injures the conscience it is criminal."

~ Henri Frederic Amiel  

"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? ... The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." ... Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! — by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. ... We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when "I'm as good as you" has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to over-top their fellows? And anyway the teachers — or should I say, nurses? — will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men."

~ C. S. Lewis  

"Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance.

~ Hendrik van Loon  

"The philosophy of the classroom today will be the philosophy of government tomorrow."

~ Abraham Lincoln  

"It has been discovered that the best way
to insure implicit obedience is to
commence tyranny in the nursery."

~ Benjamin Disraeli  

"The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind,
that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to
American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization.
Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further
popular education."

~ Council on Foreign Relations  

"True education makes for inequality;
the inequality of individuality,
the inequality of success,
the glorious inequality of talent, of genius;
for inequality, not mediocrity,
individual superiority, not standardization,
is the measure of the progress of the world."

~ Felix E. Schelling  

"One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and
the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with,
and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth
of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use
after they escape."

~ Will Rogers  

"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute."

~ Frank Zappa