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1 " Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. "
― Robert Maynard Hutchins , The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education (Great Books Of The Western World, #1)
2 " Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician. "
― Robert Maynard Hutchins
3 " The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. "
4 " A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation. "
5 " The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. "
6 " Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind. "
7 " Football, fraternities, and fun have no place in the university. They were introduced only to entertain those who shouldn’t be in the university. "
8 " To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations. "
9 " The art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not "
10 " College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America. "
11 " The state is valuable if it helps to maximize profits, but is apparently to have little part in economic life beyond this and beyond fulfilling functions which are too big or too unprofitable for private enterprise. "
― Robert Maynard Hutchins , Education for Freedom
12 " If a society does not wish to change, it cannot be reformed through the educational system. "
