Top 100 Quotes About America's Education
#1. America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.
Nicholas Kristof
#2. I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#3. Kids can and will thrive in the right conditions, but it all seems to start with the teachers, and giving those teachers the resources to teach- and not just to test.
Morgan Spurlock
#4. In fact, I believe that we need better sex education in our own culture, here in America, so that young folk learn about things like venereal disease before they encounter it.
Piers Anthony
#5. The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.
Robert Reich
#6. Your life can be different, Young Ju. Study and be strong. In America, women have choices.
An Na
#7. He was proud to have come alone to America. To learn it, as he once must have learned to stand and walk and speak. He'd wanted so much to leave Calcutta, not only for the sake of his education but also - he could admit this to himself now - to take a step that Udayan never would.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#8. America needs education reform on all levels to expand quality schools, build on past successes, and lower college debt.
Kevin McCarthy
#9. I'm a product of its [american] teaching, of its thinking, of its -isms, of its religion, of its education. I am conditioned, raised and developed by America; I am America. And as it changes, my thoughts also change. Because no matter what I believe, what the powers-that-be believe will affect me.
Erykah Badu
#10. If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.
Alan Greenspan
#11. America's public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.
P. J. O'Rourke
#12. Community colleges are one of America's great social inventions a gateway to the future for first time students looking for an affordable college education, and for mid-career students looking to get ahead in the workplace.
Barbara Mikulski
#13. Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.
Andrew Card
#14. This decade holds many changes for the United States, but the greatest needs regarding America's productivity in the 1990s, are better education and employee training.
Gregory Balestrero
#16. Just it's as close to magic as you can get in America, education.
Tim Scott
#17. You will also be called upon to provide well-timed distractions. Get the whole country arguing about sex education or gays in the military, and Americans will stop paying attention to all the things they should fear.
Kirsten Miller
#18. The anti-elitist values in America, I think, are very destructive to education.
Joshua Jackson
#19. I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.
Anna Quindlen
#20. What America is thirsting for now is a battalion of strong, down-to-earth 'doers' - managers, frontline activists, business and social entrepreneurs engaged in tackling America's manifold problems of unemployment, education, and competitive slouch.
Tina Brown
#21. In Barack Obama, we have a great education president who is rebuilding America. His Race to the Top program is doing more to 'spur us' to improve our public schools than anything we've ever done as a nation.
Jim Hunt
#22. It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
James Russell Lowell
#23. I feel like in America, we don't have a kid problem. You think about all these issues that these kids are dealing with, we have an adult problem. We have adults that do not place the priority on our kids to get a valuable education.
Alonzo Mourning
#24. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#25. Our higher education system is one of the things that makes America exceptional. There's no place else that has the assets we do when it comes to higher education. People from all over the world aspire to come here and study here. And that is a good thing.
Barack Obama
#26. You can't have a university without having free speech, even though at times it makes us terribly uncomfortable. If students are not going to hear controversial ideas on college campuses, they're not going to hear them in America. I believe it's part of their education.
Donna Shalala
#27. I made education the highest priority of my campaign - actually education and jobs - and the reason is a simple one: I think the future of America depends on it.
Chuck Schumer
#28. Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal
#30. The lack of education and lack of skills don't hurt the unemployed, they hurt America and American business, making us less competitive in the global market.
Robert Stempel
#31. I think that anybody that stays in school, gets good grades, pays the price, I think we are wealthy enough in the public and the private sector in America to make sure that every child in America that wants to continue their education, they should be able to do that.
J. C. Watts
#32. To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.
Timothy Noah
#33. In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.
Condoleezza Rice
#34. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's revenge for this humanity.What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. Martin Luther King was a misguided leader. He worked to be recognized as the leader of black America when what black America needs isn't a leader, it is education.
Jim Brown
#36. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#37. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.
James McBride
#38. Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from government. Now they come looking for free health care, free education, and a free lunch.
Harry Browne
#39. I am not a patient person. My friends and colleagues will confirm this. But, frankly, we should all feel a little more impatient with the state of public education in America today.
Eli Broad
#40. I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike.
William James
#41. From education to broadband, from building roads and bridges to supporting the military, Barack Obama is delivering for North Carolina. And he is delivering for America. A growing middle class is the foundation for a strong America.
Bev Perdue
#42. Every working family in America knows how hard it is today to find affordable childcare or early childhood education.
Bernie Sanders
#43. America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Evan Esar
#44. Education in the West, particularly higher education in America, has lost the ability to see the universe from very far away.
Charles Van Doren
#45. Bring the brothers home, and sisters home now. Legalize marijuana and take all that money and invest it in teachers and in education. You will see a transformation in America.
Carlos Santana
#46. As the 29th state to join the United States of America, it is our turn to show the nation what represents Iowa. Our commitment to quality education, hard work, and small-town values are all represented in the Iowa quarter.
Leonard Boswell
#47. You can put a public school and university in the middle of every block of every city in America - but you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.
Billy Graham
#48. I think also people in states like Pennsylvania know that a lot of money and effort and time needs to be spent on knitting America back together, on the bridges and the roads and the infrastructure and the education.
Chris Matthews
#49. If a budget is designed to show our values, it's clear where the majority stands: against opportunity, against education, and against America's hard-working, tax-paying middle class.
Ellen Tauscher
#50. It's always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it's really important to me. I don't believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education.
Marjane Satrapi
#51. We need to have a regulatory budget in America that limits the amount of regulations on our economy. We need to repeal and replace Obamacare, and we need to improve higher education so that people can have access to the skills they need for 21st century jobs.
Marco Rubio
#52. A postsecondary education is the ticket to economic success in America.
Arne Duncan
#53. For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.
Rick Perlstein
#54. The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.
Harriet Martineau
#55. When all is said and done we simply must make teaching in this country an honorable profession-since it's in the classrooms of America where the battle for excellence, ultimately, will be won or lost.
Ernest L. Boyer
#56. Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.
Gunnar Myrdal
#57. Education is useless without the Bible. The Bible was America's basic text book in all fields. God's Word, contained in the Bible, has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct.
Noah Webster
#58. You have to set big goals for yourself. And you have to put aside all the negativity in your life that tells you that if you came from a certain education or a certain family background that you can't achieve big goals. That's one of the things that America has.
Brian Tracy
#59. Corporations are not going to stash their money in the Cayman Islands. We are going to reinvest in America, create jobs, make education available to all.
Bernie Sanders
#60. On education, in order to ensure that America remains a world leader, we must create an educated, skilled workforce in the vital areas of science, math, engineering and information technology. At the same time, we must give every student access to a college degree.
John F. Tierney
#61. It's money not education that's the holy grail in America.
A.S.A Harrison
#62. America's growth historically has been fueled mostly by investment, education, productivity, innovation and immigration. The one thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with America's growth rate is a brutal work schedule.
Fareed Zakaria
#63. Who was the founder of American education? John Dewey - you know that very well - card-carrying Communist. The American education system, in America - one of the so-called 'founders' was a Communist
Rafael Cruz
#64. Teach For America provides one of the most critical pipelines for bringing new talent into public education.
Eli Broad
#65. Education is the only way forward in Latin America and developing countries in general.
Shakira
#66. Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.
Louis B. Wright
#67. What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.
Stephen King
#68. Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.
Michelle Obama
#69. I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.
Jonathan Kozol
#70. Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.
Fareed Zakaria
#71. By making college more affordable for all and more accessible for minority students, the first new higher education authorizing legislation in a decade will help strengthen our nation and America's middle class, and spur a new age of innovation and ingenuity in our country.
Nancy Pelosi
#72. Most Hispanics are concerned with the same issues other Americans are - the economy, jobs, education. Similar to Main Street America.
Henry Bonilla
#73. We need to quit subsidizing the costs for illegal immigrants' residency in America immediately. How long will we allow them to siphon millions upon millions from honest taxpaying Americans by supporting their health care, welfare, education and criminal expenses?
Newt Gingrich
#74. Corporate America needs to get its act together to see that the education system is changed so it produces what it needs. The educational system that teaches kids to be passive recipients of knowledge worked when most workers were sitting in assembly lines.
Seymour Papert
#75. When Abraham Lincoln was murdered The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold Was that the assassin shouted in Latin As he lept on the stage This convinced Matthew There was still hope for America.
Christopher Morley
#76. This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset.
David Ignatius
#77. When our forbears - yours and mine - came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life.
Robert Kennedy
#78. I have made education a top priority of this Administration because when we get it right, when every child learns, America will be a more hopeful place.
George W. Bush
#79. A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#80. Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; then need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.
Amanda Ripley
#81. The Russian Federation and the United States of America, the two biggest nuclear powers in the world, but apart from nuclear-wise, we have a lot in common. We have huge territories, natural resources, technologies, science, education, and of course human capital.
Sergei Lavrov
#82. I think you'd change Alabama fundamentally if in six years someone said, 'If you want the best education in America, you've got to live in Alabama.' you'd change economic development, change the image of this state, you'd offer these kids an opportunity they otherwise would never have had.
Bob Riley
#83. I am on the Health Education Labor Committee. That committee wrote the Affordable Care Act. The idea I would dismantle health care in America while we're waiting to pass a Medicare for all is just not accurate.
Bernie Sanders
#84. Education is a fundamental principle of what made America a success. We can't afford to throw any young people away.
Ben Carson
#85. In business, I loved cars. I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. Only in America can you decide to get a good education and pursue what you like.
Lee Iacocca
#86. In America we believe that every child, no matter where they live, who their family is, or what the color of their skin, is entitled to as good an education as the richest parent in America can give to their children.
John Edwards
#87. Clinton understands that in a competitive global economy we need the best-educated workforce in the world. She and I worked together on a proposal that will revolutionize higher education in America.
Bernie Sanders
#88. I am running for president to help create a better future. A future where everyone who wants a job can find one. Where no senior fears for the security of their retirement. An America where every parent knows that their child will get an education that leads them to a good job and a bright horizon.
Mitt Romney
#89. In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.
Elizabeth Warren
#90. The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement ... We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America.
Pat Robertson
#91. We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.
Dan Quayle
#92. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#93. This is not a skill problem, this is a will problem. Does America have the will to make education a priority? We know the things that work. Why don't we scale up those things that do work.
Tavis Smiley
#94. Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.
Wendy Kopp
#95. America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.
David McCullough
#96. I don't have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that's the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.
Sloan Wilson
#97. If you've ever wondered how many prisons need to operate withinin America, just look at the literacy rate. 60% of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.
United States Dept. Of Education
#98. A native of America who cannot read or write is ... as rare as a comet or an earthquake.
John Adams
#99. Reducing our dependence on foreign energy - that is critically important to America's economic future. Excellence in education - if we're not the best educated, we're not going to be the most powerful for very long.
Kent Conrad
#100. Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million - more than one-quarter of all America - have not even finished high school.
Lyndon B. Johnson
