Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"[A]ny provider that commands 90 percent of the market -- whether we're talking about software, phone service, or heating oil -- is, by definition, a monopoly. Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn't it strike anyone as strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal -- as something that has always been and must always be? ... [C]ompetition forces public schools into making long-overdue repairs. And it offers poor parents the choices they desperately desire."

~ Jennifer A. Grossman  

"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily
present itself to be graded and classified like meat?
No wonder school is compulsory."

~ John Taylor Gatto  

"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question
the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach
students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ?
Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority
of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools
to teach children to question the authority of government?"

~ Neal Boortz  

"For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life -- to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this -- a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one."

~ Herbert Spencer  

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."

~ John Stuart Mill  

"The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people."

~ Peter McWilliams  

"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself."

~ Galileo Galilei  

"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."

~ George Bernard Shaw  

"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars."

~ Richard Mitchell  

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."

~ Abigail Adams  

"But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?"

~ Daniel Joseph Berrigan  

"Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth. That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work. But it also is not for the faint of heart. And that is a lesson that is almost never transmitted today. That offense, bruising thoughts, and unpleasant facts simply go with the territory. They are an intrinsic feature of an open society, and they never can be entirely avoided."

~ Amy Wax  

"Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language."

~ Butler D. Shaffer  

"Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge.
Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights."

~ Dr. Benjamin Rush