George F. Will Quotes

I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

College professors are suspect because whenever emotion is in control, anti-intellectualism prevails.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

A cultivated mind is one to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties.

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other 'studies' courses.

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

We need to get back to reasoning and thinking things through. The future generation is being brought up in greed and without a true understanding of civics. There is no more emphasis on knowledge and time. As a society we need to process ideas and understand what certain principles are based upon.

To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.

I have witnessed how education opens doors, and I know that when sound instruction takes place, students experience the joys of new-found knowledge and the ability to excel.

In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

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.

It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.