George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

… the third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.

School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they're - have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own bed, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student. I was a brat. If I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself.

I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.

I certainly didn't learn anything in school. My education was the world.

I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.

I was sent successively to schools in France, Italy and Bavaria, and this erratic education was a great help afterwards.

Rock stars are idiots. You know that! Remember this moron never went to music school, never learned music theory and can't read or write music. So why not be suspicious of everything this idiot says?

I was an ordinary boy at school, a young man. In fact, what did the headmaster once say? "You're constantly challenging those in authority; questioning and challenging those in authority." Which was not really the way I saw it. I felt there were questions that had to be answered, and things that weren't quite right.

Don't let them fool ya, or even try to school ya! Oh, no! We've got a mind of our own, so go to hell if what you're thinking is not right!

My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.

I always say that, to me, it starts with reading. This is something I tell high school kids, college kids, people trying to get into the business, that it's just so much about reading. Read, read, read. So much of everything else falls into place when you just do a ton of reading.

I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers...creativity above fact regurgitation...individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance..... And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.

I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.

The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.

No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.

I'm timeless, I got that Dickensian, London street-urchin look in high school. I'll never be in style, but I'll always be different.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.