Quotes About A Liberal Education

#1. The central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.

Fareed Zakaria

#2. Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

Angelina Grimke

#3. Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.

Jane Smiley

#4. To teach is to learn twice. About all some parents accomplish in life is to send a child to Harvard. The purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place to spend one's leisure.

Joseph Joubert

#5. Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.

Alfred Richard Orage

#6. That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will.

Thomas Huxley

#7. A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.

Sidney Hook

#8. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Woodrow Wilson

#9. A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

Wendell Berry

#10. A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.

John Lancaster Spalding

#11. If you know your Bible and your Shakespeare and can shoot craps, you have a liberal education.

Tallulah Bankhead

#12. Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.

Aldo Leopold

#13. Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Ellen Key

#14. Men of polite learning and a liberal education.

Matthew Henry

#15. A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

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

Robert M. Hutchins

#17. The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

Alfred North Whitehead

#18. Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body.

John Henry Newman

#19. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#20. Perhaps the most fundamental value of a liberal education is that it makes life more interesting. It allows you to think things which do not occur to the less learned ... it makes it less likely that you will be bored with life.

Kingman Brewster Jr.

#21. I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.

Taslima Nasrin

#22. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.

Sydney J. Harris

#23. Though her mien carries much more invitation than command, to behold her is an immediate check to loose behaviour; to love her was a liberal education.

Richard Steele

#24. Even to see her walk across the room is a liberal education.

C.S. Lewis

#25. I lament the want of a liberal education. I feel the mist of ignorance to surround me - Nathanael Greene

David McCullough

#26. Henry deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education.

Mary Shelley

#27. I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

Tallulah Bankhead

#28. A liberal education forms ... a single body. Those, therefore, who from tender years receive instruction in the various forms of learning, recognize the same stamp on all the arts, and an intercourse between all studies, and so they more readily comprehend them all.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

#29. What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.

Felix Rohatyn

#30. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

Albert Einstein

#31. In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

Isaac Asimov

#32. What are any of the disciplines but a way in which people trying to make sense of the world or the universe?

Joan Countryman

#33. The basic purpose of a liberal arts education is to liberate the human being to exercise his or her potential to the fullest.

Barbara M. White

#34. I deplore the tendency, in some institutions, to go directly toward training for a trade or profession or something and ignoring the liberal arts. It is the foundation of education.

Ronald Reagan

#35. To a man of liberal education, the study of history is not only useful, and important, but altogether indispensable, and with regard to the history contained in the Bible ... it is not so much praiseworthy to be acquainted with as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.

John Quincy Adams

#36. The value of the old liberal education was not that it made men "well-rounded," like a ball bearing, but that it gave them the freedom of the height and breadth and depth of human experience, including man's mysterious encounter with his Creator. To

Anthony Esolen

#37. Only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a 49 percent increase in funding for education was not enough.

George W. Bush

#38. Young people don't really study the facts; they watch the skewed MSNBC and get a primarily liberal education.

Alana Stewart

#39. My personal advice is to go to school first and get a liberal arts education, and then if you want to pursue acting, go to graduate school.

Jillian Bach

#40. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats and dogs.

Marva Collins

#41. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

Leo Strauss

#42. Higher educating is defaulting on its obligations to offer young people a quality and broad-based education. This is true in part because the liberal arts and humanities have fallen out of favor in a culture that equates education with training.

Henry Giroux

#43. The teaching of any science, for purposes of liberal education, without linking it with social progress and teaching its social significance, is a crime against the student mind. It is like teaching a child how to pronounce words but not what they mean.

Chris Carter

#44. I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world.

Steve Case

#45. A liberal arts education teaches you how to think - I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way.

Stephen King

#46. The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation.

Wendy Brown

#47. I do regret that when I went to college, I didn't have a liberal arts education. I got a BFA in musical theater, so it was a very directed toward what I was doing. I wish that I had expanded my horizons a little bit.

Heather Dubrow

#48. I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write.

Tom Brokaw

#49. Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

John Adams

#50. Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.

John Dewey

#51. My parents had an old-fashioned ideal of college, that four years at a liberal arts college should be a liberal arts education.

Julie Bowen

#52. I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy.

Stephen Cole Kleene

#53. The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#54. Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

Joseph Stiglitz

#55. Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty percent of the useful work of the world.

Toni Morrison

#56. The necessity of the universal and the particular is a central aspect of liberal education, and is likewise joined in the great narratives of history.

Ellis Washington

#57. Investment in early education is not a Liberal or Conservative idea. Nor should it be decided along party lines.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#58. When I finished high school, I was 16, and in Argentina you have to choose a career right after high school. There is no such thing as a liberal arts education.

Cesar Pelli

#59. The primary school I attended in Shanghai was a very liberal one, established by scholars who had return from an education in France. The children of leading families were enrolled there, including the son of a well-known man believed to be a top gangster of the underworld!

Charles K. Kao

#60. To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you'll need in the society of the future.

Thomas Frank

#61. I wasn't using college as a stepping stone to law school or some other career. I just wanted a liberal-arts education.

Charlie Trotter

#62. It is evident, then, that there is a sort of education in which parents should train their sons, not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble.

Aristotle.

#63. Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.

Alan K. Simpson

#64. I got a liberal arts education just because I felt like I should to keep my parents happy, but it was for them. If it was up to me, I would've just moved to New York.

Kathryn Hahn

#65. No school can supply an anti-liberal education, or a fascist education, as these terms are contradictory. Liberalism and education are one.

George Seldes

#66. The really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get at a [liberal arts college] isn't really about the capacity to think but, rather, the choice of what to think about

David Foster Wallace

#67. Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.

Charles William Eliot

#68. The fine arts, both in those who cultivate and those only who admire them, open and expand the mind to great ideas. They inspire liberal feelings, create a harmony of temper, favorable to a sense of justice and a habit of moderation in our social intercourse.

Joel Barlow