Alan Kay Quotes

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.

If we learn from those only, of whose lives and opinions we altogether approve, we shall have to turn from many of the highest and profoundest minds.

One of my favorite teachers is Osho, mainly because he liked to push people's buttons just to get them to think and live outside of their comfort zone.

Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.

The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it's enormously useful in life.

We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.

In high school, I would drive my teachers batty. They would make a statement, and I would say, 'Why is that?' They didn't want to be questioned.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.

Nobody's going to tell me how to be different, so stop asking me. Stop asking me what two-plus-two is. Everybody knows two-plus-two is five.

My university teacher and mentor Kenneth Arrow remembers me as a student who asked good questions. Although I had not previously thought of myself in that way, on reflection I think that Arrow was right.

I'm constantly asking for alternative views on most things that come to me.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.

It is the business of culture to make us able to consider with intelligent interest all real opinions, even those we do not and can not accept.

It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

To be a contrarian, you've got to be a contrarian against your own people.

There are always people who are doing things that don't fit the official accounts.

My parents were lovers of books, and they raised us in a manner that viewed freedom and subversion as indispensable.

I have a suspicion of lockstep and everyone looking in the same direction: that's a key character trait in me.

As a culture, we've all agreed with the opinion that the world should be seen in a certain way, so at 'The Nightly Show,' our chief mission was to disagree with that premise. And to see the world in a way that may not make everybody comfortable. And to present it with a cast of people who don't always get to have a voice on that.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.