W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

One of the most important features of the later stages of capitalist civilization is the vigorous expansion of the educational apparatus and particularly of the facilities for higher education.

This great Western institution, the university, dominates the world today more than any other institution: more than the church, more than the government, more than all other institutions. All the leaders of government are graduates of universities, or at least of secondary schools or colleges whose administrators and teachers are themselves graduates of universities….professionals—doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. have all passed through the mill of the secondary school, the college and the university. And the men of the media are university trained

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.

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

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

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

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Class I to XII wasn't much help; I was always a mediocre student. But when I pursued higher education and studied economics with theatre or psychology with science fiction, I got a whole new world view.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that, by the time they leave school, every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it

Universities are the temple through which alone lies the road to that of Liberty.

We want a corps of educated instructors – we want gratuitous instruction in our academies and colleges. The di minorum of learning ought to be elevated in the scale of public estimation and intellectual endowment.

I had an excellent Ivy League education, and it gave me a long view of things.

One of my main reasons for going to college is to try to get a liberal arts background.

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.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It's about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life.

Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.