Jack McDevitt Quotes

One of my first role models was Eugene Lang, a wealthy businessman who went back to his elementary school in East Harlem and addressed the sixth-grade class. He looked out at that sea of faces and said, "If any of you wants to go to college, I will pay for it." When I read that, I burst into tears. It was so generous and so basic. Not fluffy. I can't understand why we scrimp on education and shortchange our kids. Why would the citizenry do that to the people who are going to inherit its republic?

We should see schools as safe arenas for experimenting with life, for discovering our talents... for taking responsibity for tasks and others people, for learning how to learn... and for exploring our beliefs about life and society.

We really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. If we don't do that, we're going to get the generation we deserve.

An educated people can be easily governed.

What we look for in the school is unrealized potential.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

A good education is the most important gift we can give our young people.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

We all ran barefooted on the dusty roads in our past, but now the Emperor wears shoes, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the barefooted child and the doting mother are afforded a holistic environment to realise their dreams and ambitions.

The main hope of a state lies in the proper education of its youth.

Education is not just another consumer item. It is the bedrock of our democracy.

In my opinion, it helps enormously to know why something is true, rather than being told it is true, for why should you believe me? Never believe anything on the authority of a single person but seek confirmation — and reason is the best confirmation

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat. They do not try to persuade at any cost. They appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority ...

One of the most important aspects of science that I learned from my father was to distrust authority.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Stay in school because education provides you with an opportunity. Opportunity is all you can ask for.

School was always a major player in my personal journey. It allowed me to open up to the world, and also social mobility. It allowed me to enrich myself, to read, learn and understand.

The youth is the future, and anything I can do to give to them, I'll do it.

The fruit of liberal education is not learning, but the capacity and desire to learn, not knowledge, but power.

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

There’s more time spent on teaching kids about recycling than on character development in the American schools.

One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience.

Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy.

To receive a 10-point ride is a blessing in itself, but to have it honored by giving to those who could use a little support to accomplish the things they want to do in life is a bigger blessing. The school is something I believe hugely in. They provide a special place for kids to understand things that many people avoid or never learn to deal with their whole lives.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.