More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife - and watch TV.
Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
When we listen to the radio, look at television and read the newspapers we wonder whether universal education has been the great boon that its supporters have always claimed it would be.
...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.
This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault.
America's experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.
Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible.
A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.
It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things.
Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised
It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.
Whether four years of strenuous attention to football and fraternities is the best preparation for professional work has never been seriously investigated.
Whenever the urge to exercise comes upon me, I lie down for a while and it passes.
It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.
The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.
It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.
The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.
The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.
We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.
Too few have the courage of my convictions.
We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.
Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings.
