This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Education today, more than ever before, must see clearly the dual objectives: education for living and education for making a living." - James Mason Wood
"All true educators since the time of Socrates and Plato have agreed that the primary objective of education is the attainment of inner harmony, or, to put it into more up-to-date language, the integration of the personality. Without such an integration learning is no more than a collection of scraps, and the accumulation of knowledge becomes a danger to mental health." - Alfred Zimmern, fully Sir Alfred Eckhard Zimmern
"Next to the care of our own souls a right education of our children is greatest." - John Bellers
"Beauty is a part of education." - Martha Berry, fully Martha McChesney Bery
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!" - Anton Theophilus Boisen
"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave." - Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"Education should be constructed on two bases: morality and prudence. Morality in order to assist virtue, and prudence in order to defend you against the vices of others. In tipping the scales toward morality, you merely produce dupes and martyrs. In tipping it the other way, you produce egotistical schemers." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
"The end of all education should surely be service to others. We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about the progress and prosperity of our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others for their sake and for our own." - César Chávez, fully César Estrada Chávez
"Lowering consumption need not deprive people of goods and services that really matter. To the contrary, life’ most meaningful and pleasant activities are often paragons of environmental virtue. The preponderance of things that people name as their most rewarding pastimes are infinitely sustainable. Religious practice, conversation, family and community gatherings, theater, music, dance, literature, sports, poetry, artistic and creative pursuits, education, and appreciation of nature all fit readily into a culture of permanence – a way of life that can endure through countless generations." - Alan Thein Durning
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein
"The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth." - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
"If a man’s education is finished, he is finished." - Edward Albert Filene
"Education - the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat." - Martin Fischer, fully John Martin Fischer
"Moral ambiguity creates mental cramps of various sorts, which lead to reflection, discussion, and argument… Morality resists theoretical unification under either a set of special-purpose rules or single general-purpose rule or principle, such as the categorical imperative or the principle of unity. If this is right, and if it is right because the ends of moral life are plural and heterogeneous in kind and because our practices of moral education rightly reflect this, then we have some greater purchase on why the project of finding a single theoretically satisfying moral theory has failed." - Owen Flanagan
"Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine." - Benjamin Franklin
"At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education." - Paul Fussell
"God is no dictator. He leaves us the freedom to master ourselves." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving." - Russell Green
"The school system can’t make up for family failure. The total education of our children is a cooperative effort requiring community solidarity. Apathetic parents who foster a permissive home atmosphere create a problem for everyone." - John Hansgate
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of 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
"Culture is but the fine flowering of real education, and it is the training of the feeling, the tastes, and the manners that make it so." - Minnie Kellogg, born Laura Miriam Cornelius
"What education is to the individual, revelation is to the whole human race." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
"Schools inevitably teach good or bad values in everything they do. Every interaction, whether part of the academic curriculum or the human curriculum of rules, roles, and relationships, has the potential to affect a child’s values and character for good or for ill. The question is not whether to do values education but whether to do it well." - Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
"The most basic form of moral education is the treatment we receive." - Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
"And neither mind nor character can be made without a spiritual element. This is just the element that has grown weak, where it has not perished, in our education, and therefore in our civilization, with disastrous results." - Richard Livingstone, fully Sir RIchard Winn Livingstone
"The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated graduates - people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call “life.”" - Thomas Merton
"Democracy without education is hypocrisy without limitation." - Iskander Mirza, fully Major-General Sahibzada Sayyid Iskander Ali Mirza
"Any education worthy of the name is bound to be dangerous." - Professor Neil
"Education is nothing more than the polishing of each single link in the great chain that binds humanity together and gives it unity." - Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
"How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school. It is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas enter into every phase of life, they should have been so little utilized as instruments of education." - Jean Piaget
"Neither power nor wealth, neither education nor ability, neither gifts of creativity nor stores of human energy can insure against the reality that suffering will be our companion at some time during our journey. It is a presence as inseparable from the human condition as food and oxygen are from human life. It is part of our legacy." - Paula Ripple, fully Paula Ripple Comin
"And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established." - Louis Auguste Sabatier
"The true problems of living – in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc. – are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of man not merely the employment of his reasoning powers but the commitment of his whole personality." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart." - Walter Scott, fully Sir Walter Scott,1st Baronet
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." - B. F. Skinner, fully Burrhus Frederic "B.F." Skinner
"The need for imagination, a sense of truth and a feeling of responsibility: those are the three forces which are the very nerve of education." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
"Men and women must be educated, in great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, until society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education." -
"Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members." - Mary Catherine Bateson
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
"It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." - Albert Einstein
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein
"[Plato's ideal society] guarantees to all people the right to an education that diagnoses and perfects their unique talents, plus a work role that conveys a sense of self-esteem, saving them from the neuroses of megalomania and the lust for power. It forbids privilege and sexism and all other criteria irrelevant to merit. It eliminates conflict of interest from those who hold office and gives the masses a potent checklist they can use to hold their rulers to account. Best of all, it eliminates all traces of "might makes right" and serves as a pattern laid up in heaven to rank actual societies in terms of what corrupts them. Society becomes more corrupt as the struggle for power becomes more brutal." - James R. Flynn, aka Jim Flynn