People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.

Admission of ignorance is often the first step in our education.

If you want a new idea, read an old book.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance between chaos and community.

Personal growth is not a matter of learning new information but of unlearning old limits.

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

The purpose of Propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

What exactly is your 'fair share' of what 'someone else' has worked for?

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?