Quotes About The Liberal Arts

#1. At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Joyce Carol Oates

#2. Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

Baruch Spinoza

#3. If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

Roger Zelazny

#4. You parents can provide no better gift for your children than an education in the liberal arts. House and home burn down, but an education is easy to carry along.

Martin Luther

#5. Music, of all the liberal arts, has the greatest influence over the passions, and it is that to which the legislator ought to give the greatest encouragement.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#6. 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

#7. The liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue, but merely set it going in that direction.

Seneca.

#8. Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.

George Washington

#9. 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

#10. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#11. Cuba's poverty is caused by the crackpot Marxist doctrines imposed by its sociopathic ruler and promoted by half the liberal arts professors on American faculties.

David Horowitz

#12. Law builds upon and, I should like to claim, is one of the liberal arts. It uses words of persuasion and changing definitions for practical ends.

Edward Levi

#13. To be thoroughly imbued, with the liberal arts refines the manners, and makes men to be mild and gentle in their conduct.

Ovid

#14. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.

Jeremy Denk

#15. Bolton School has a great tradition in the liberal arts.

Ian McKellen

#16. Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.

Michel De Montaigne

#17. There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.

James Joyce

#18. Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.

Ovid

#19. Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.

Harrison Salisbury

#20. Indeed, men who have either quaffed or even tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their aid far more deeply
into the secrets of the divine wisdom." - John Calvin

John Calvin

#21. The liberal arts are the arts of communication and thinking. 'They are the arts indispensable to further learning, for they are the arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, figuring,

Oliver DeMille

#22. The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

Steve Jobs

#23. 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

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

Joan Countryman

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. The arts tend to be more liberal. There tends to be more social relevance in the arts.

Peter Guber

#28. Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise.

Richard J. Foster

#29. The role of a liberal arts college within a university is to be a genuine part of that university, giving and responding to the other parts.

Edward Levi

#30. As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

Henry Giroux

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

Marva Collins

#32. I don't know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.

Sydney Pollack

#33. America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

Ben Shapiro

#34. I was fortunate in that I attended university in Canada in the early 1970s when you could take a true liberal arts degree with no programmes, majors or minors.

O.R. Melling

#35. Chadron had a water tower, grain elevators, a tanning salon, a video rental store, a small liberal arts college, a Hardee's, a stoplight, and a curling yellow sign in the pet store window that read, 'Hamsters and Tarantulas Featured Today.'

Poe Ballantine

#36. When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.

Andrea Mitchell

#37. It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough - it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

Steve Jobs

#38. Liberal learning is that which underlies, that which gives purpose and direction to practical skills. It tries to distinguish between the more and the less important, between the grand and the trivial, and to concern itself rather with the center than with the periphery.

Denham Sutcliffe

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Man, he could sell. As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it because I spent hours in conversation with him over the 14 years he ran Apple.

Walt Mossberg

#42. The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.

Mark Helprin

#43. The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,

Walter Isaacson

#44. Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?

Pamela Dean

#45. Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

Philip Zaleski

#46. Unless you took courses in architecture, engineering, or pre-med, the rest of your liberal arts education hardly prepares you for life as the business warrior and champion you envision yourself to be.

Gene Simmons

#47. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires-it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.

Robert P. George

#48. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.

Lorenzo Ghiberti

#49. 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

#50. I'd had the quintessential liberal arts experience, and I came out of college not having a clue of what to do.

John Wesley

#51. Josh Radnor is that rare thing: a writer-director who thinks like an actor but still knows how to create a comedy with shape and vision. Liberal Arts is the best movie about college I've seen since I don't know what ... Dryly affectionate and super-sharp. Elizabeth Olsen is every inch a star.

Owen Gleiberman

#52. No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

Will Durant

#53. I have not been able to give a concrete answer to the question of how the nations of Asia can create their own unique liberal arts traditions that are not simply the importation of a Western model. The question is a critical one and the answer must come from Asian universities themselves.

Henry Rosovsky

#54. History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past.

Robert Kurson

#55. No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience.

Adam Smith

#56. 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

#57. Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.

Robert Reich

#58. Education in the ingenious arts and in the liberal professions is still more tedious and expensive. The pecuniary recompense, therefore, of painters and sculptors, of lawyers and physicians, ought to be much more liberal; and it is so accordingly.

Adam Smith

#59. Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

Laurie Halse Anderson

#60. They could address everything else and still not solve the problem. He was always proud of her when she said that. A liberal arts background was a hard thing to overcome, but she was doing great.

James S.A. Corey

#61. Reading can break us out of the tunnel vision of the narrow specialty and lead us into many intriguing and important avenues of thought.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

#62. 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

#63. First semester, I learned that Jack Rogers sandals, so revered in college, screamed, "My small liberal arts school will always be the center of the universe!" I'd found a new axis, so into the trash went my gold, silver, and white pairs.

Jessica Knoll

#64. 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

#65. 106. A GREAT CITADEL The most likely allegory is that the Citadel represents philosophy (that is, human reason without the light of God) surrounded by seven walls which represent the seven liberal arts,

Dante Alighieri

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

Felix Rohatyn