Hendrik Willem Van Loon Quotes

We've got to dumb America up again.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

Most people know nothing about learning; many despise it. Dummies reject as too hard whatever is not dumb.

This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.

Schools teach ignorance.

To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show the darkness but to put out our own eyes.

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

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

I'm not educated; I'd be a damn fool if I was (educated)!

Too many of our countrymen rejoice in stupidity, look upon ignorance as a badge of honor. They condemn everything they don't understand.

The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.

I would argue that stupidity is born out of bad reading, bad teaching and bad thinking!

Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity.

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.

I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.

To think to be wise alone is a very great folly.

Reason! how many eyes hast thou to see evils, and how dim, nay, blind, thou art in preventing them.

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

I'm not an educated man. I only know what I'm told, and I'm not told that much; I have no frame of reference for how to place things in history be a responsible leader. All I can do is be an artist.

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.