It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country.
Learning to write is learning to think. You don’t know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.
You just don’t know anything unless you can write it. Sure you can argue things out in your own head and bring them out at parties, but in order to argue anything thoroughly, you must be able to put it down on paper.
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
Republicans are people who, if you were drowning 50 feet from shore, would throw you a 25-foot rope and tell you to swim the other 25 feet because it would be good for your character. Democrats would throw you a hundred-foot rope and then walk away looking for other good deeds to do.
In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
The last thing a scientist would do is cling to a map because he inherited it from his grandfather, or because it was used by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.
Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.
English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.
There is only one thing age can give you, and that is wisdom.
You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you’re arguing is because you’re using different words.
Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.
Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.