Liberal Education Quotes

Henry deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education. ~ Mary Shelley

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

Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body. ~ John Henry Newman

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

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 forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance towards higher points and nobler aims. ~ Friedrich Max Muller

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

Young people don't really study the facts; they watch the skewed MSNBC and get a primarily liberal education. ~ Alana Stewart

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

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

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable ... He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor ... No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate. ~ John Paul Jones

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education. ~ Angelina Grimke

Liberal education should give people the skills that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job. ~ Fareed Zakaria

The necessity of the universal and the particular is a central aspect of liberal education, and is likewise joined in the great narratives of history. ~ Ellis Washington

If you know your Bible and your Shakespeare and can shoot craps, you have a liberal education. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There is no liberal education for the under-languaged. ~ Agnes Repplier

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning
and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature. ~ Ivan Illich

The teaching of any science, for purposes of liberal education, without linking it with social progress and teaching its social significance, is a crime against the student mind. It is like teaching a child how to pronounce words but not what they mean. ~ Chris Carter

Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and
care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends ~ Ivan Illich

Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness. ~ Leo Strauss

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

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful. ~ Leo Strauss

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

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

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living ... In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another - namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings. ~ James Truslow Adams

No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one. ~ George Seldes

The central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill. ~ Fareed Zakaria

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

Paul Blumberg writes: "A Massachusetts Act of 1651, for example, prohibited status disguises in such matters as dress, and declared 'our utter detestation and dislike that men and women of meane Condition should take upon themselves the garb of gentlemen, by wearing gold and silver, lace or buttons, or points at their knees or to walk in bootes or women of the same rancke to wear silke or tiffany horlles or scarfes, which though allowable to persons of greater estates, or more liberal education, yet we cannot but judge it intollerable in persons of such like condition. ~ Diego Gambetta

Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed ... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment. ~ Norman Dorsen

It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the nature of a commodity to be exchanged for position, status, wealth, etc., in the future. 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. The practical educators assume that human society itself is the only significant context, that change is therefore fundamental, constant, and necessary, that the future will be wholly unlike the past, that the past is outmoded, irrelevant, and an encumbrance upon the future -- the present being only a time for dividing past from future, for getting ready.

But these definitions, based on division and opposition, are too simple. It is easy, accepting the viewpoint of either side, to find fault with the other. But the wrong is on neither side; it is in their division...

Without the balance of historic value, practical education gives us that most absurd of standards: "relevance," based upon the suppositional needs of a theoretical future. But liberal education, divorced from practicality, gives something no less absurd: the specialist professor of one or another of the liberal arts, the custodian of an inheritance he has learned much about, but nothing from. ~ Wendell Berry

The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all. ~ Fareed Zakaria

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

I strongly believe that the best economic policy
for any administration is the one that seeks to produce more entrepreneurs,
not just more minimally educated college graduates with
nowhere to go. Nothing against recent college graduates, but many
of today's best universities are no longer providing the basics of a
classical liberal education.
That is why the single most important economic issue of our
time - and one that impacts the poor and middle class alike - will be
how we treat the entrepreneurs and wealth creators among us, from
both the government and the private-sector viewpoints. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Even to see her walk across the room is a liberal education. ~ C.S. Lewis

Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education. ~ Fareed Zakaria

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will. ~ Thomas Huxley

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

Though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; to love her was a liberal education. ~ Richard Steele

I feel a reassuring oneness with other people when I find that even my most intimate, anguished, socially inadmissible emotions and desires are known to others ... Kindred souls - indeed, my selves otherwise costumed - turn up in books in the most unexpected places. Discovering them is one of the great rewards of a liberal education. If I quote liberally, it is not to show off book learning, which at my stage of life can only invite ridicule, but rather to bathe in this kinship of strangers. ~ Yi-Fu Tuan

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people. Most students at today's colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don't want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn't make sense for them. ~ Charles Murray

A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within. ~ Ann Radcliffe

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

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

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.

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity. ~ Ellen Key

The fruit of liberal education is not learning, but the capacity and desire to learn, not knowledge, but power. ~ Charles William Eliot

Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn't possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.) … Bereft of a liberal education – 'liberal' in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of 'em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. … Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don't want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a force ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Teaching is different today. Teachers don't just stand at the board and lecture while the kids take notes. What we're ultimately teaching them is to teach themselves. ~ Tony Danza

If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it's this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.
Social change, education, new-product launches, religious movements ... it doesn't matter, the story is the same. Movements are at the heart of change and growth. A movement - an idea that spreads with passion through a community and leads to change - is far more powerful than any advertisement ever could be.
As you consider what to do next, you're faced with a difficult choice. It's difficult because it represents giving up something you may be quite comfortable with, and it's difficult because it requires an all-or-nothing commitment. ~ Seth Godin

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love is the most essential ingredient of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones. ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency. ~ Rene Descartes

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government?s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes them! It is such a fraud. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront our adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they. Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Education is the transmission of civilization. ~ Ariel Durant

Life is a present; life is a miracle.
Life is a song divine.
When you touch my heart, hold my soul.
Oh my pure valentine. ~ Debasish Mridha

Even if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize 'legacy' content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant ... Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of information in today's electronic society, which ... calls for an even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills
the very sort of 'legacy' content that teachers have focused on since classical times ~ Timothy VanSlyke

[T]ry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda. ~ L. Neil Smith

My mother had been a grade-school teacher, and my father had an eighth-grade education. ~ Gordon Bell

The age was still dark and reeked of the havoc and misfortunes of the Goths who had put all good literature to destruction. But, by God's goodness, in my time light and dignity were returned to letters, and I see there such improvement that today I would have great difficulty being admitted to the most elementary classes
I, who in my time was reputed to be (and not wrongly) to be the most knowledgeable person of the century. ~ Francois Rabelais

Forgive others without complaint or concern. ~ Debasish Mridha

Jesus has paid the price to save and to set you free from the bondage of sin. All that you have to do is believe. It doesn't take an immense degree of knowledge to believe. It doesn't take a certificate of prestigious honor in the world of higher education to be accepted into the royal family of God. You just have to believe. ~ Calvin W. Allison

Love is the most potent instrument of action than anything known to humanity. ~ Debasish Mridha

We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it ~ Ron Rash

I think what's been lacking from our discussion for a long time is really that other part of what a Budget chair does, which is set the priorities for this country in terms of making sure we invest in the right places, in education, in job training, and to make sure we do a balanced approach moving forward. ~ Patty Murray

It reminded me that they [the students] were more than just their scholarly shortcomings and gripes about the workload. Each had a history, a set of problems. Each, for better or worse, was anchored to a family. ~ Wally Lamb

I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers. ~ Edward Abbey

I am not an economic determinist. If I were, I would throw up my hands; I just would not bother. I think it's wrong to be an economic determinist. I think it's wrong to simply say, "Well, inevitably, if you're poor, you're going to get a lousy education; if you're lower-middle class, the cards are going to be stacked against you, and you'll probably never get anywhere." ~ Robert Reich

Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom.
Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose. ~ Oliver DeMille

One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing in itself. But the business leaders who put emphasis on filling entry-level job slots are too frequently the people who, by prior lobbying and voting patterns and their impact upon social policy, have made it all but certain that few of these urban kids would get the education in their early years that would have made them look like college prospects by their secondary years. First we circumscribe their destinies and then we look at the diminished product and we say, "Let's be pragmatic and do with them what we can. ~ Jonathan Kozol

A simple act of kindness could be the source of great happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Defining freedom cannot amount to simply substituting it with inclusion. Countering the criminalization of Black girls requires fundamentally altering the relationship between Black girls and the institutions of power that have worked to reinforce their subjugation. History has taught us that civil rights are but one component of a larger movement for this type of social transformation. Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love. ~ Monique Morris

Humility was an offensive characteristic for a God, in the eyes of early non-Christians. How could Christians worship a God who deliberately chose to share in human birth with all its mess and vulnerability and limitation, as well as a shameful death? How can we now worship a God to whom all the unimportant little details of our lives actually matter? How can we respect a God who takes us more seriously than we take ourselves, and yet is not impressed with all our accomplishments? Who loves us equally well, whetherwe succeed or fail? How could it really be that God simply disregards not only our education, our tastes, our industry, our niceness, our worthiness in order to love us? God's greatness we can begin to approach. The sheer humility of God's love is incomprehensible. ~ Roberta C. Bondi

If everyone's purpose of life is to be happy, kind, caring, and compassionate, this world will become heaven. ~ Debasish Mridha

It depends on education
that holder of the keys which the Almighty hath put into our hands
to open the gates which lead to virtue or to vice, to happiness or misery. ~ Philip Sidney

The country experience was more of a departure. When you consider my education and my upbringing, you can see that was more of country rock outgrowth of my popular music aspirations. ~ Tom Wopat

I challenge you to show me where the saloon has ever helped business, education, church, morals or anything we hold dear. ~ Billy Sunday

You are most happy when you can give yourself away to others. ~ Debasish Mridha

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness.
It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are. ~ Sharon Salzberg

What poor education I have received has been gained in the University of Life. ~ Horatio Bottomley

If everyone fights with the power of their love, there will be happiness, not the destruction or war. ~ Debasish Mridha

President Barack Obama and his family. (I was respectful, I believe, but I told him I did not like his drone strikes on Pakistan, that when they kill one bad person, innocent people are killed, too, and terrorism spreads more. I also told him that if America spent less money on weapons and war and more on education, the world would be a better place. If God has given you a voice, I decided, you must use it even if it is to disagree with the president of the United States.) ~ Malala Yousafzai

Today many associate nationalism with anti-liberal forces, but at least during the nineteenth century nationalism was closely aligned with liberalism. ~ Yuval Noah Harari