“The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens”

from The Great Conversation

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“...the Great Books [are] the most promising avenue to liberal education if only because they are teacher-proof.”

from The Great Conversation

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“You cannot expect the slave to show the virtues of the free man unless you first set him free.”

from The Great Conversation

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“When young people are asked, ‘What are you interested in?’ they answer that they are interested in justice: they want justice for the Negro, they want justice for the Third World. If you say, ‘Well, what is justice?’ they haven't any idea.”

from The Great Conversation

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“There appears to be an innate human tendency to underestimate the capacity of those who do not belong to ‘our’ group. Those who do not share our background cannot have our ability. Foreigners, people who are in a different economic status, and the young seem invariably to be regarded as intellectually backward”

from The Great Conversation

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“It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation.”

from The Great Conversation

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“The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is that the difference between the ‘uneducated’ and the ‘educated’ is so slight.”

from The Great Conversation

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“[We need to] recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon present problems the wisdom that lies in the work of our greatest thinkers”

from The Great Conversation

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“The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon us 24 hours a day mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.”

from The Great Conversation

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“Great books are great teachers; they are showing us every day what ordinary people are capable of. These books come out of ignorant, inquiring humanity. They are usually the first announcements for success in learning. Most of them were written for, and addressed to, ordinary people.”

from The Great Conversation

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“The anarchy of competing sovereign states must lead to war sooner or later. Therefore we must have law, enforced by a world organization attained through world co-operation and community.”

from The Great Conversation

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“A world republic of law and justice must set up the devices of learning by which everybody can become a citizen of the world.”

from The Great Conversation

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“Political freedom cannot last without provision for the free unlimited acquisition of knowledge. A political order is tyrannical if it is not rational.”

from The Great Conversation

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“An educational system that aims at vocational training or social adjustment, or technological advance is not likely to lead to the kind of maturity that the present crisis demands… a country that is powerful, inexperienced, and uneducated can be a great danger to world peace.”

from The Great Conversation

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“We who say that we believe in democracy… committed to the proposition that all men shall be free cannot admit that ordinary people cannot have a good education… The aim of education is wisdom and each must have the chance to become as wise as he can.”

from The Great Conversation

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“Descartes dated his life as a philosopher from 1619 [and] spent the remainder of his youth in traveling, 'resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world.'”

from Great Books of the Western World

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“We know that there is no defense against the most destructive of modern weapons. Both the victor and the defeated will lose the next war. All the factors that formerly protected this country—geographical isolation, industrial strength, and military power—are now obsolete.”

from The Great Conversation

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“every man's mind ought to keep working all his life long; every man's imagination should be touched as often as possible by great works of imagination... education ought to end only with life itself.”

from The Great Conversation

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“The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for full human development, and, since the liberal arts are the basic means of such development, devotion to democracy naturally results from devotion to them.”

from The Great Conversation

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“The principle enemy of freedom is illusion... the illusion of the importance of the sie or quantity, the illusion of our technical superiority, the illusion that we don't dare to think. and there is the illusion related to all these illusions—the illusion of progress.”

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

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