Echoes

Only the educated are free.

Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance ... can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.

Every Israelite has a duty to study whether he is poor or rich, whether healthy or suffering, whether young or very old and in failing strength, even if he is poor and supported by charity or begs from door to door.

Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life ... it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

Man is the only animal that knows nothing and can learn nothing without being taught.

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds… to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement and success have no meaning.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Do not mistake yourself by believing that your being has something in it more exalted than that of others.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.