Jerome Bruner Quotes

School gives you the freedom to explore different philosophies, religions, aspects of yourself, and subjects.

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

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

Travel teaches as much as books.

People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

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.

Education helps one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any.

This is an increasingly diversifying society, and people are coming into much closer contact with each other than they ever did. I find that a problem for a university, because bumping up against people who disagree with you is fundamental to the creation of new knowledge. And so universities can't go silent. You can't have a place where it's not permitted to make a certain kind of argument. But you can have a place which forbids epithets to be thrown at people.

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

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

You always want to learn, you know.

I think it's important to stay curious and see and experience as much as you can, whether it's art, performance, music, travel, or just hanging out and people-watching.

I just want to open people's eyes to different things.

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.

You always need to be curious and study.

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

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.

If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.

I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.

I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.