ROBERT M. HUTCHINS

We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.

This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered; about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.

A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

The fate of our country, and hence of the world, depends on the degree to which the American people achieve liberal education. It is a process…of placing in the hands of the American people the means of continuing and revitalizing Western civilization, for the sake of the West and for the sake of all mankind.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

... a threat to American education .... [Colleges would become] educational hobo jungles.

The problem for the churches and synagogues of America is ... the tendency to think of religion itself in terms of "usefulness" and "service" to the community, or the contribution faith can make toward guaranteeing personal "peace of mind." Like almost everything else, religion in America is valued for services rendered.

The one reason we know that every totalitarian government must fail is that no totalitarian government is prepared to face the consequence of free universities.

Our Christian civilization will have to Christianize itself in a hurry. It will have to dedicate itself to the proposition that men are men before they are Englishmen, businessmen, workingmen, or Americans, and that all men are brothers.... This proposition, always popular on Sundays, requires the subordination of Americanism to Humanity.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment.

Our object today should be not to weaken government in competition with other centers of power, but rather to strengthen it as the agency charged with responsibility for the common good. That government is best which governs best.

Academic freedom is simply a way of saying that we get the best results in education and research if we leave their management to people who know something about them.

A university is a place that is established and will function for the benefit of society provided it is a center of independent thought.

America's experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization, but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.