Top 52 Robert Hutchins Quotes
#1. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.
James Webb Young
#2. For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.
Robert M. Hutchins
#3. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#4. The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#5. 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
#6. Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert M. Hutchins
#7. We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.
Robert M. Hutchins
#8. Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised
Robert M. Hutchins
#9. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#10. 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
#11. Equality and justice, the two great distinguishing characteristics of democracy, follow inevitably from the conception of men, all men, as rational and spiritual beings.
Robert M. Hutchins
#12. Whether four years of strenuous attention to football and fraternities is the best preparation for professional work has never been seriously investigated.
Robert M. Hutchins
#13. My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
Robert M. Hutchins
#14. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#15. The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.
Robert M. Hutchins
#16. Football, fraternities, and fun have no place in the university. They were introduced only to entertain those who shouldn't be in the university.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#17. Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.
Robert M. Hutchins
#18. We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.
Robert M. Hutchins
#19. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#22. The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#23. We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
Robert M. Hutchins
#24. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#25. Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#26. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#27. Josh Hutchins's battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs.
Robert McCammon
#28. Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.
Robert M. Hutchins
#29. To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#30. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#31. It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.
Robert M. Hutchins
#32. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#33. The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.
Robert M. Hutchins
#34. To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.
Robert M. Hutchins
#36. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#37. College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#38. The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
Robert M. Hutchins
#39. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#40. 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
#41. Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible.
Robert M. Hutchins
#42. Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.'
Robert M. Hutchins
#43. The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.
Robert M. Hutchins
#44. Whenever the urge to exercise comes upon me, I lie down for a while and it passes.
Robert M. Hutchins
#45. There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.
Robert M. Hutchins
#46. The fullest development of the highest powers of men can be achieved only in a world of peace.
Robert M. Hutchins
#47. A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.
Robert M. Hutchins
#48. 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.
Robert Maynard Hutchins
#49. 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.
Robert M. Hutchins
#50. When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.
Robert M. Hutchins
#51. A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death
Robert M. Hutchins
#52. Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.
Robert M. Hutchins
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