Liberal Education Quotes

• We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Class, Tasks, Want

  "The Meaning of a Liberal Education". Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association, January 9, 1909.

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• I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Education, Grandchildren, Dice

  "Tallulah: My Autobiography". Book by Tallulah Bankhead, 1952.

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• Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.

  Charles William Eliot

  Education, Honor, World

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

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Education, Hippie, Teaching

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• Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.

  John Dewey

  Animal, Men, Training

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• The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Education, College, Mind

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• Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

  Ellen Key

  Skills, Giving, Dignity

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• The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

  Alfred Whitney Griswold

  Education, Ideas, Censorship In Books

  "Quora: What Does Freedom of Speech Mean?". www.yahoo.com. May 13, 2017.

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• Perhaps the most fundamental value of a liberal education is that it makes life more interesting. It allows you to think things which do not occur to the less learned ... it makes it less likely that you will be bored with life.

  Kingman Brewster, Jr.

  Thinking, Interesting, Bored

  "Kingman Brewster Jr., 69, Ex-Yale President and U.S. Envoy, Dies" by Eric Pace, www.nytimes.com. November 9, 1988.

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• Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

  Alfred Whitney Griswold

  Education, Running, Fear

  "Quora: What Does Freedom of Speech Mean?". www.yahoo.com. May 13, 2017.

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

  Charles William Eliot

  Education, School, Desire

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• Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

  John Adams

  Education, Wise, Learning

  John Adams (1841). “Letters of John Adams: Addressed to His Wife”, p.284

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• Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. ... It is at the same time a training in boldness. ... It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions

  Leo Strauss

  Views, Average, Training

  Leo Strauss, Hilail Gildin (1989). “An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays”, p.319, Wayne State University Press

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• Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.

  Leo Strauss

  Greatness, Perfect, Excellence

  Leo Strauss (1995). “Liberalism Ancient and Modern”, p.6, University of Chicago Press

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• I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.

  Taslima Nasrin

  Mother, Brother, Father

  "Taslima Nasrin and the Struggle Against Religious Fundamentalism". Interview with ISIS, www.taslimanasrin.com.

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• A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

  Wendell Berry

  Past, Needs, Assumption

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.121, Counterpoint

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• The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Education, Adequate, Antithesis

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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• Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

  Jane Smiley

  Thinking, Critical, Converses

  Jane Smiley (2017). “Moo”, p.24, Pan Macmillan

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• A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.

  Sidney Hook

  Understanding, Perception, Awareness

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• I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

  David McCullough

  Ignorance, Want, Mist

  David McCullough (2011). “David McCullough Library E-book Box Set: 1776, Brave Companions, The Great Bridge, John Adams, The Johnstown Flood, Mornings on Horseback, Path Between the Seas, Truman, The Course of Human Events”, p.24, Simon and Schuster

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• To a man of liberal education, the study of history is not only useful, and important, but altogether indispensable, and with regard to the history contained in the Bible ...it is not so much praiseworthy to be acquainted with as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.

  John Quincy Adams

  Education, Men, Ignorant

  John Quincy Adams (1848). “Letters of John Quincy Adams, to His Son, on the Bible and Its Teachings”, p.34

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• Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.

  Aldo Leopold

  Nature, Fuel, Failing

  Aldo Leopold (1968). “A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There”, p.72, Oxford University Press

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• We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Art, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.

  Alfred Richard Orage

  Book, Museums, Library

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• The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

  Robert M. Hutchins

  Life, Education, Teacher

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