“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.” 

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.” 

“When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports.” 

“Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.” 

A lot of my travel is at least partly work, visiting schools and libraries, especially in France.

“The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” 

“That's what education should be," I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way.” 

“Books are immortal sons defying their sires.” 

“Writing is the geometry of the soul. ” 

“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.” 

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.” 

“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.” 

I'll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.

“I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can’t use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what’s in the scene.”

We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.

My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.

My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.

I was a college dropout, hitchhiking across the Midwest. That was part of the old, adventurous spirit.

“Slippery use of the word “privilege” is part of a vogue of calling achievements “privileges”—a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life.” 

“People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.” 

“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”

“Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.”

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”