Noam Chomsky Quotes

Education, the last hope of the liberal in all periods.

A universityeducates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.

I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age.

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

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

I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience.

The partisanship which, as a rule, dominates all appointments here renders any governmental agent unfit to tamper with ... [universities], for partisanship seeks to manipulate every thing for personal or party advantage and does nothing, intentionally, for such abstractions as civilization and culture.

The more complex the problems of the Nation become, the greater is the need for more and more advanced instruction.

Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently indolence and dissipation have steadily diminished

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

By the time they are 21 years of age they are almost ready to leave college and have been subjected to the corrosive influence and brainwashing of ultra-liberal and radical professors.

I thought, 'If I go to uni, I can read and watch people and take many different subjects - take philosophy modules - and have time to travel in the summers,' which I did. I thought, 'I hope this will make me a better actor,' and it did.

In 1996, I took advantage of some favourable circumstances to propose to the state of the Ticino Canton the foundation of the Academy of Architecture and, with it, an Italian-speaking university in Switzerland.

Public universities are the lifeblood of modern democracies.

A university is a place where ancient tradition thrives alongside the most revolutionary ideas. Perhaps as no other institution, a university is simultaneously committed to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

The modern university does not exist to teach alone...It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament...The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation.

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

It is no longer higher education, it is higher 'indoctrination '

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.