Denis Dutton Quotes

You don't have to become an investment banker as a way of demonstrating that education has worked for you. But librarians have to believe in the values of high culture. Not just high culture but middle culture, low culture, kinds of exciting eye-catching crap of all kinds. Everyone needs that.

What could be wiser and to give people who can think the leisure in which to do it.

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.

A good education should leave much to be desired.

If you're smarter than me, you shouldn't be reading my books.

Museums are good things, places to look and absorb and learn.

Education is not a tool for development - individual, community and the nation. It is the foundation for our future. It is empowerment to make choices and emboldens the youth to chase their dreams.

The value of a good education has never left me.

Only a well-rounded intellect, a spirit nourished in the eternal sources of intelligence and culture, of justice and wisdom, is a safeguard against both indifference and skepticism.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.

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

I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.

I think education was the key for me, and that's what I tell kids. That base in the classics gave me something to springboard from, which I wouldn't have had if I'd come out to Los Angeles early and been guest punk of the week on 'Hill Street Blues.'

I started studying in '85 and got knowledge of self and started spitting. What was going on was taking the understanding of what I was reading and applying it with my life and applying it with my rhymes.

Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.

The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse.

Education develops the intellect; and the intellect distinguishes man from other creatures. It is education that enables man to harness nature and utilize her resources for the well-being and improvement of his life

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you.

Learning, like traveling and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.