16 quotes
The great problem of our time is moral, intellectual, and spiritual.
Education for Freedom (1943)
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Criticisms that I have mentioned come to the same thing: that liberal education is too good for the people.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
Many colleges of liberal arts and the researches of many scholars in the humanities and the social studies are important only to those whose livelihood depends upon them.
The Great Conversation (1952)
The aim of human beings and human societies, if there is one, is material comfort. Freedom is simply doing what you please. The only common principle that we are urged to have is that there are no principles at all.
Education for Freedom (1943)
The rise of experimental science has not made the Great Conversation irrelevant. ... Science itself is part of the Great Conversation.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
All should be well acquainted with and each in his measure actively and continuously engaged in the Great Conversation that man has had about what is and should be.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
For forty years and more our intellectual leaders have been telling us they are not true. In the whole realm of social thought there is nothing but opinion. Since there is nothing but opinion, everybody is entitled to his own opinion.
Education for Freedom (1943)
As Whitehead has said "If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it is cannot be educational. In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place."
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
There is a sense in which every great book is always over the head of the reader: he can never fully comprehend it. That is why these books are great teachers; they demand the attention of the reader and keep his intelligence on the stretch.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
Well, it seems to me it might be better if the colleges had race horses. The jockeys could wear the school colors and they could ride the races, and the horses wouldn't have to pass the entrance examinations.
Liberal education was aristocratic in the sense that it was the education of those who enjoyed leisure and political power. If it was the right education for those who had leisure and political power, then it is the right education for everybody today.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
Because the bulk of mankind has never had the chance to get a liberal education, it cannot be "proved" that they can get it. Neither can it be "proved" that they cannot. The statement of the ideal, however, is of value in indicating the direction that education should take.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
We do not confine people to looking at poor pictures and listening to poor music. We urge them to look at as many good pictures and hear as much good music as they can, convinced that this is the way in which they will come to understand and appreciate art and music.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
It is sometimes admitted that many propositions that are affirmed by intelligent people, such as that democracy is the best form of government or that world peace depends upon world government, cannot be tested by the method of experimental science.
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)
It is doubtful, too, whether we can achieve free minds by concentrating our efforts on making our pupils economically independent. We want free minds which will seek the goods in their order. Those who seek primarily their private economic interests may become enslaved to them and try to enslave the rest of us as well.
Education for Freedom (1943)