Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.
John Milton called his school, Christ College, 'a stony-hearted stepmother'. The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities, then every business office, government agency, golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.
The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage.
The cynic says, 'One man can't do anything.' I say, 'Only one man can do anything.'
Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
It's a staggering transition for high school students that found they could study five hours a week and make As and Bs.
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
