Toronto Globe & Mail Quotes

The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas. Thus it permits the freest expression of views before students, trusting to their good sense in passing judgment on these views. Only in this way can it best serve American democracy.

A democracy depends on its people, the literate and the well read.

Democracy depends on well educated and engaged citizens.

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

If information and knowledge are central to democracy, they are conditions for development.

And in Canada we, you know, it costs us three or $400 million to have an election. You know, it's always been my position that we shouldn't complain about that; that's the price of admission for a living in a great democracy.

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

Democracy can only spring from practising it early, and democratic action was not to expected from young people brought up under a close authoritarian system.

I always tell my students: I don't care which side you're on. I respect you too much to try to persuade you in 120 minutes a week, much less lure you into pretending that you agree with me. All I want is for you to own this democracy, to see yours, to have a stake in it.

Most people associate reading with laying on the beach. They don't see that it's crucial for a democracy!

Education and democracy have the same goal: the fullest possible development of human capabilities.

Questioning is the great strength of democracy; the ability to doubt without losing face

Because we are a democracy, there will be “winners” and “losers” on policy issues and curriculum decisions. But if the different perspectives have been given full and fair hearing and if every effort has been made to protect the conscience of all parents and students, then even those who may “lose” on a particular policy will most likely remain supporters of the public schools.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights ... at the school house door.

I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as a self-governing people to hear everything relevant

The development of democracy is very much a matter of education and of progressing step by step.

Our forefathers realized the importance of education to a nation, and particularly the importance of an educated people in a democracy, but we seem to have forgotten what sacrifices they made to start a public school system in this country.

Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations... In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.

Education, then, as universally diffused as the elements of God, is the life-blood of our body politic. The intelligence of the people is the one great fact of our civilization and our prosperity, — it is the beating heart of our age and of our land. It is education alone which makes equality possible without anarchy, and liberty without license.

A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district ... are the principle support of virtue, morality and civil liberty.

In a well-functioning democracy, people frequently encounter topics and points of view that they did not specifically select but from which they learn. Those encounters can change minds and, even, the course of lives.

We have to move back to the idea that education isn't about teaching people to bow to rigid rules. That's not what democracy is about.

The real safeguard of democracy is education.