Robert M. Hutchins Quotes

I think well-read people - the world is open to them.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Education must, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.

I've always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.

The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

Education exposes young people to a broader world, a world full of opportunity and hope.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one's self from the tyranny of any of them.

Though he was not a reader himself, my father understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

Education, school should prepare us not to morally judge everyone, but to be able to find our own truth in this world of various points of view.

Education broadens our horizons and enables us to confront realities we'd never before anticipated.

My mom was big on education, big on reading, so she was always pushing books on me: 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' like, 'Read these books.' And it was like, man, I'm learning stuff that I just can't get anywhere else.

School was always a major player in my personal journey. It allowed me to open up to the world, and also social mobility. It allowed me to enrich myself, to read, learn and understand.

The fruit of liberal education is not learning, but the capacity and desire to learn, not knowledge, but power.

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

Every man can educate himself. It's shameful to put one's mind into the hands of those whom you wouldn't entrust with your money. Dare to think for yourself.

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.

I don't ever want to be the type of person to tell you what to think or what to believe. Whatever stage in your life that you are in, I want you to organically reach whatever conclusions that you possibly reach.

For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.

One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.

A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.