Van Jones Quotes

If you put enough smart people together in one space, good things happen.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.

One thing I am determined on is that by the time I die my brain shall weigh as much as a man's if study and learning can make it so.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

An ignorant man ages like an ox. His flesh may increase, but not his understanding.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

The more one knows, the luckier he is, for knowledge is the greatest gift in life.

I'm not hopeful about America, and I'm not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who are lucky, there's a great deal to enjoy in it. But will things get better for most people? I don't know. I don't see the evidence.

With younger children the greatest reward is to be able to pass on to a new stage in each subject. It is a punishment to a young child not to be allowed to use the apparatus but to sit still and do nothing.

Mental or spiritual health, which is rationality, makes for progress, and the future demands greater and greater mental or spiritual health, greater and greater rationality. The brain must dominate and direct both the individual and society in the time to come, not the belly and the heart.

The good news is hopeful doesn't mean dumb. The bad news is cynical doesn't mean smart.

Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.

In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.

America was my home for a very long time, and it's a fascinating, pioneering country that many people look to. In the recent past it hasn't been doing very well, but there's a great new hope now with the election of Obama. America took a very big leap there and proved that it still has the edge as far as being able to do things many other countries may find difficult.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.

If you make one gift this year, make it the gift of knowledge.

Read more. Read. Read. Read. Deeply, widely, read. Learn all kinds of subjects. The smarter you are as an actor, the better an actor you'll be.

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.