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Education Quotations

Thomas Jefferson letter to Trustees for the Lottery of East Tennessee College
Categories: Education
Date: May 6, 1810
No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its effect towards supporting free and good government.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Jose Correa de Serra
Categories: Education
Date: November 25, 1817
To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the college and university. The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: November 28, 1820
The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Colonel Charles Yancey
Categories: Education
Date: January 6, 1816
If a nation expects to be ignorant - and free - in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

John Adams Defense of the Constitutions
Categories: Education
Date: 1787
Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
George Washington First Annual Message
Categories: Education
Date: January 8, 1790
Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness.

James Wilson Of the Study of the Law in the United States
Categories: Education
Date: 1790
Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge.

John Adams Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law
Categories: Education
Date: 1756
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.

Noah Webster On Education of Youth in America
Categories: Education
Date: 1790
It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.

James Madison letter to Littleton Dennis Teackle
Categories: Education
Date: March 29, 1826
The best service that can be rendered to a Country, next to that of giving it liberty, is in diffusing the mental improvement equally essential to the preservation, and the enjoyment of the blessing.

James Madison letter to W.T. Barry
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1822
A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

James Madison letter to W.T. Barry
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1822
What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?

Samuel Adams letter to James Warren
Categories: Education
Date: November 4, 1775
No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffusd and Virtue is preservd. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauchd in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.

The Northwest Ordinance The Northwest Ordinance
Categories: Education
Date: July 23, 1787
Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
James Madison letter to William Barry
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1822
The liberal appropriations made by the legislature of Kentucky for a general system of education cannot be too much applauded. ...Learned institutions ought to be the favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty....What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?
Benjamin Franklin Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania
Categories: Education
Date: 1749
The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Common-wealths. Almost all Governments have therefore made it a principal Object of their Attention, to establish and endow with proper Revenues, such Seminaries of Learning, as might supply the succeeding Age with Men qualified to serve the Publick with Honour to themselves, and to their Country.

George Washington letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia
Categories: Education
Date: January 28, 1795
[W]e ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.

Thomas Jefferson Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1818
To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Carrington
Categories: Education
Date: January 16, 1787
Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves.

George Washington First Annual Message
Categories: Education
Date: January 8, 1790
There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential. To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways: By convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration, that every valuable end of Government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people: and by teaching the people themselves to know, and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last, and uniting a speedy, but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the Laws.
John Adams Thoughts on Government
Categories: Education
Date: 1776
Laws for the liberal education of the youth, especially of the lower class of the 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 Thoughts on Government
Categories: Education
Date: 1776
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them.

John Adams Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law
Categories: Education
Date: 1765
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

Benjamin Franklin Poor Richard's Almanack
Categories: Education
Date: 1733
A fine genius in his own country is like gold in the mine.

George Washington Farewell Address
Categories: Education
Date: October 19, 1796
Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.
Thomas Jefferson letter to Joseph C. Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: January 22, 1820
All the States but our own are sensible that knowlege is power.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Dupont de Nemours
Categories: Education
Date: April 24, 1816
Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Joel Barlow
Categories: Education
Date: December 10, 1807
People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.

Thomas Jefferson letter to Edward Carrington
Categories: Education
Date: January 16, 1787
Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.

Thomas Paine Rights of Man, part 2
Categories: Education
Date: 1792
A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.

George Washington letter to George Chapman
Categories: Education
Date: December 15, 1784
The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.
Herbert Croly The Promise of American Life
Categories: Collectivism, Education
Date: 1909
[T]he national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a collective purpose. [Progressive]
Calvin Coolidge Foundations of the Republic The Press Under a Free Government
Categories: Education, Government, Tyranny
Date: Unknown
It is all the more necessary under a system of free government that the people should be enlightened, that they should be correctly informed, than it is under an absolute government that they should be ignorant. Under a republic the institutions of learning, while bound by the constitution and laws, are in no way subservient to the government.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Noah Worcester
Categories: Education, Human Nature, War
Date: 1817
I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington
Categories: Education, Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1787
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey
Categories: Education, Newspapers, Press, The Press
Date: 1816
The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson
Categories: Education, Power
Date: 1820
I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey
Categories: Education
Date: 1816
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Littleton Waller Tazewell
Categories: Education, Liberty
Date: 1805
Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell
Categories: Education, Republican Government
Date: 1814
There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: 1818
A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest.
John Adams Thoughts on Government
Categories: Character, Education
Date: Unknown
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 Dewey German Philosophy and Politics
Categories: Education
Date: 1915
Germany is the modern state which provides the greatest facilities for general ideas to take effect through social inculcation. Its system of ideas is adapted to that end. Higher schools and universities are really, not just nominally, under the control of the state and part of the state life….Moreover, one of the chief functions of the universities is the preparation of future state officers. Legislative activity is distinctively subordinate to that of administration conducted by a trained civil service, or, if you please, bureaucracy. Membership in this bureaucracy is dependent upon university training. [Progressive]
John Adams A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law
Categories: Character, Education, The People
Date: 1765
A native of America who cannot read or write is…as rare as a comet or an earthquake.
Noah Webster On the Education of Youth in America
Categories: Education
Date: 1788
The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament
Alexander Hamilton The Federalist Papers Federalist No. 9
Categories: Education, Government
Date: Unknown
It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy…great improvement…were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients
John Adams
Categories: Education, The People
Date: Unknown
The consequences of these institutions (The towns or districts, the congregations, the schools,and the militia.) have been, that the inhabitants, having acquired from their infancy the habit of discussing, of deliberating, and of judging of public affairs, it was in these assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people were formed in the first place, and their resolutions were taken from the beginning to the end of the disputes and the war with Great Britain.
James Madison Constitution of the United States Art. I, Sec. 8
Categories: Constitution, Education
Date: September 17, 1787
Congress shall have Power…to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Thomas Jefferson Letter to Joseph Cabell
Categories: Education
Date: 1820
Knowledge is power
John Adams Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America
Categories: Education
Date: Unknown
The education here intended in not merely that of the children of the rich and noble, but of every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest. It is not too much to say that schools for the education of all should be placed at convenient distances, and maintained at the public expense
Thomas Jefferson [Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, et al.,] Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia,
Categories: Education
Date: August 4, 1818
[T]o instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens…this brings us to the point at which are to commence the higher branches of education...To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order
Thomas Jefferson . [Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, et al.,] Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia
Categories: Education, Public Service
Date: August 4, 1818
The objects of this primary education … would be…to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend
Thomas Jefferson Diffusion of Knowledge.
Categories: Education, Political Leaders
Date: 1779
[Students of] reading, writing and common arithmetick…Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history…should be rendered…worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens
George Washington Farewell Address
Categories: Education, Religion and Morality, Virtue
Date: October 19, 1796
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle
Benjamin Rush Of the Mode of Education Proper for a Republic
Categories: Citizenship, Education
Date: Unknown
The business of education has lay[ed] the foundations for nurseries of wise and good men, to adapt our modes of teaching to the peculiar form of our government… He must be taught to love his fellow creatures in every part of the world, but he must cherish with a more intense and peculiar affection the citizens of Pennsylvania and of the United States.
John Dewey
Categories: Education
Date: Unknown
[S]chools should take an active part in directing social change, and share in the construction of a new social order [Progressive]
John Dewey
Categories: Education
Date: Unknown
[S]chools should take part in the great work of construction and organization that will have to be done. [Progressive]
Thomas Jefferson Report as Commissioners for the University of Virginia with James Madison
Categories: Education
Date: March 4, 1895
[I]t is (our) duty … to pay especial attention to the principles of government which shall be inculcated therein (at the University), and to provide that none shall be inculcated which are incompatible with those on which the Constitutions of this State, and of the United States were genuinely based, in the common opinion; and for this purpose it may be necessary to point out specially where these principles are to be found legitimately developed
Benjamin Rush Of the Mode of Education Proper in the Republic.
Categories: Education, Religion and Morality
Date: Unknown
Such is my veneration for every religion that reveals the attributes of the Diety, or a future state of rewards and punishments, that I had rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mahomed inculcated upon our youth than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles