Robert M. Hutchins Quotations

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault.

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.

A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.

A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive short-wave facilities scattered; about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.

We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.

Too few have the courage of my convictions.

More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife - and watch TV.

Anybody who feels at ease in the world today is a fool.

Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings.

We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.

Whether four years of strenuous attention to football and fraternities is the best preparation for professional work has never been seriously investigated.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.

America's experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.

We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.

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.

It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.

Nature will not forgive those who fail to fulfill the law of their being. The law of human beings is wisdom and goodness, not unlimited acquisition.

...the fullest development of the highest powers of men can be achieved only in a world of peace.

Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.'

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

On the principle laid down by Gilbert and Sullivan that when everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody; if everybody is abnormal, we don't need to worry about anybody.

Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised

The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.

Whenever the urge to exercise comes upon me, I lie down for a while and it passes.

Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible.

For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.

Football, fraternities, and fun have no place in the university. They were introduced only to entertain those who shouldn't be in the university.

When we listen to the radio, look at television and read the newspapers we wonder whether universal education has been the great boon that its supporters have always claimed it would be.

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.

The best education for the best is the best education for all.

College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.