J. D. Salinger Quotes

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs.

I’m getting worried. This year I’m paying eleven thousand dollars. And that’s the first time in six years that I’m paying anything. My lawyers take care of it

I want to give businessmen an honorable place but they make crooks out of themselves.

Basically, as everybody that has had a taste of the record business knows, they are gangsters and crooks.

Corruption and illicit financial flows are different. But they really must be twinned. This is because, for practical purposes, it is an eminently more sensible approach to treat most of the sources of illicit financial flows as corrupt activity, within a broader use of the term.

The middle years - the eighteen-seventies, 'eighties, 'nineties - were a time of moral bankruptcy when men stole millions by a stroke of the pen or by the simple expedient of printing tons of worthless paper.

To my great-grandfather I owed the advice to dispense with the education of the schools and have good masters at home instead - and to realize that no expense should be grudged for this purpose.

Goldman Sachs was one of those companies whose illegal activity helped destroy our economy and ruin the lives of millions of Americans. But this is what a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system and a broken criminal justice is about. These guys are so powerful that not one of the executives on Wall Street has been charged with anything after paying, in this case of Goldman Sachs, a $5 billion fine.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

In the private system and the private schools, the principal is pretty much a dictator. He or she can hire whoever s/he wants. Of course, in the movie, in the story, she makes a mistake by hiring him. But, if she doesn't, I have no story.

Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding.

Private boarding schools and Catholic schools on the East Coast are something. Choate really ruined my father's life. He's had nightmares about Choate every since he went there. Treat Williams, who's a good friend, went to Kent School, in Connecticut. The stories I've heard about those places - didn't you have one nun who was just the worst nightmare?

Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.

There were times in school when a person had to do things fast, cheap, and without character.

In all honesty, I never actually did anything wrong (in my eyes, at least) at school or misbehaved in any big way. If it was anything, it was probably just a lot of clowning around.

Every city should make the common school so rich, so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments, and so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be able to live under the drip of it.

We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.

Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.

The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.

I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.

I have four kids in a private school who have not yet entered college. Their tuition is what keeps me motivated. Life is simple sometimes.

His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.

I'm not sure Betsy DeVos has ever spent a day in a public school. And I don't - I'm pretty sure Donald Trump hasn't.

The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better.