Quotes & Sayings About Liberal Arts

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

I attended an extremely small liberal arts school. There were approximately 1,600 of us roaming our New England campus on a good day. My high school was bigger. My freshman year hourly calorie intake was bigger. — Sloane Crosley

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." 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 advantage. — Fareed Zakaria

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

I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world. — Steve Case

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. — David Foster Wallace

The arts tend to be more liberal. There tends to be more social relevance in the arts. — Peter Guber

Hell hath no fury like a liberal arts major scorned. — Florence King

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

Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, being absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two
a proof of the decline of that country. — Lord Chesterfield

So if the worth of the arts were measured by the matter with which they deal, this art-which some call astronomy, others astrology, and many of the ancients the consummation of mathematics-would be by far the most outstanding. This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathe matics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service. — Nicolaus Copernicus

The boy, called Urbain, is now fourteen years old and wonderfully clever. He deserves to be given the best of educations, and in the neighborhood of Saintes the best education available is to be had at the Jesuit College of Bordeaux. This celebrated seat of learning comprised a high school for boys, a liberal arts college, a seminary, and a School of Advanced Studies for ordained postgraduates. Here the precociously brilliant Urbain Grandier spent more than ten years, first as schoolboy, and later as undergraduate, theological student and, after his ordination in 1615, as Jesuit novice. Not that he intended to enter the Company; for he felt no vocation to subject himself to so rigid a discipline. No, his career was to be made, not in a religious order, but as a secular priest. — Aldous Huxley

The disappearance of an audience that had supported experimentation and made such works financial, as well as critical, successes. The decline of liberal-arts teaching in schools and colleges meant that the new audience was less cultured and intellectually oriented; wedded to television and movies, it wanted to be entertained rather than challenged. — Meryle Secrest

I do regret that when I went to college, I didn't have a liberal arts education. I got a BFA in musical theater, so it was a very directed toward what I was doing. I wish that I had expanded my horizons a little bit. — Heather Dubrow

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace. — Roger Zelazny

I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system. — Matt Taibbi

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

But that's life. That's your education. A series of opportunities and missed opportunities. Exams and grades and blue books and blue balls and majors and minors and liberal arts and liberal minds. The scam of it is, no matter how much you paid or how far you traveled, everybody's receipt says pretty much the same damn thing. BA, MBA, JD, PhD, MA, BS.

BS. That's all it is, right? — Ryan Quinn

Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise. — Richard J. Foster

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

What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides. — Felix Rohatyn

Upon the whole, Chymistry is as yet but an opening science, closely connected with the useful and ornamental arts, and worthy the attention of the liberal mind. And it must always become more and more so: for though it is only of late, that it has been looked upon in that light, the great progress already made in Chymical knowledge, gives us a pleasant prospect of rich additions to it. The Science is now studied on solid and rational grounds. While our knowledge is imperfect, it is apt to run into error: but Experiment is the thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth. — Joseph Black

Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us. — Michel De Montaigne

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

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

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

They were and are children of privilege ... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called developmental difficulty. — David Mamet

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

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

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

I had a liberal arts education at Amherst College where I had two majors, mathematics and philosophy. — Stephen Cole Kleene

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

Bolton School has a great tradition in the liberal arts. — Ian McKellen

History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past. — Robert Kurson

I was sitting with the rest of my college graduating class listening to the commencement speaker prepare us for life after graduation, and he had a lot of ground to cover because my liberal arts education had skirted the issue for 4 years. I was just waiting for them to call my name so I could go up, collect my diploma, fold it into a paper hat, and start flipping burgers at McDonalds. — Doug Lansky

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

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

He didn't understand that it's all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that rises its head and nods like cobra when you're sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it's even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. — David Sedaris

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

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

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

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

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

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

The seven "liberal arts": Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because "without numbers there is nothing"; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. — Barbara W. Tuchman

I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified. — Eugene McCarthy

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education. — Joseph Stiglitz

I went to a little liberal-arts college in Missouri called Truman State University. — Jenna Fischer

When I finished high school, I was 16, and in Argentina you have to choose a career right after high school. There is no such thing as a liberal arts education. — Cesar Pelli

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind. — Philip Zaleski

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free. — William Deresiewicz

Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature. — A. Scott Berg

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

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

A basic flaw in contemporary American educational philosophy as much as it is under the influence of the late John Dewey, is it s failure to grasp the essentially artistic character of teaching. Due to an inflated opinion of "science" and all things supposedly "scientific," educators have been loathe to admit that teaching is an art, not a science. The art of teaching is a mingling of the liberal and the dramatic arts. Above and beyond the subject matter, the teacher actually needs but two assets: (a) a grasp of the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric,and logic; (b) a mastery of the dramatic art of presentation." - pg 126 footnote 1. — Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

Studying the liberal arts is an intransitive activity; the effects of studying these arts stays within the individual and perfects the faculties of the mind and spirit. The study of liberal arts is like the blooming of a rose; it brings to fruition the possibilities of human nature. The utilitarian or servile arts enable one to be a servant - of another person, of the state, of a corporation, or of a business - and to earn a living. The liberal arts, in contrast, teach one how to live; they train the faculties and bring them to perfection; they enable a person to rise above his material environment to live an intellectual, a rational, and therefore a free life in gaining truth. — Miriam Joseph

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership
leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.
Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status
Steve Jobs
recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets. — Damon Horowitz

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past. — Will Durant

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

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

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

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

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.

He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself. I should be well enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with average young man in prosperous circumstances. — Charles Dickens

College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few. — David Brooks

I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school. — Mike White

I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine. — John Battelle

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

What did it profit that I read the greatest human ideas of the so-called "liberal arts" in the books I got hold of. My thinking was enslaved to corrupt desires, so what difference did it make that I could read and understand these books? I delighted in learning, but I had no divine context for what my mind picked up. I had no foundation to discern what is true or certain. I was standing with my back to the light, so that the things that should be illuminated were in shadow, even though they were in front of my face. — Augustine Of Hippo

I was a liberal arts junkie and I figured, well, I'll go work for somebody somewhere. All I knew was that I was going to have to come home and figure it out. — Mary Chapin Carpenter

I started in a business background, but then it was like, 'you know, I can't do math,' so I changed it to a liberal arts degree and got my Bachelor of Arts in Communications and it made sense. — Jeff Dunham

Martianus Capella strove to collect what he considered the highest accomplishments of his culture, the Seven Liberal Arts, and his collection - in weird poesical format - seemed a candle to many, during the Dark Ages. That story inspired Isaac Asimov, by the way, to write his famed Foundation sci-fi series. — David Brin

What are any of the disciplines but a way in which people trying to make sense of the world or the universe? — Joan Countryman

For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life. — Derek Bok

Talk about what you love and keep quiet about what you don't. — Josh Radnor

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

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

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. — Henry Doss

I'm a liberal arts junkie. — Mary Chapin Carpenter

Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words ... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies." — John Of Salisbury

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

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

I'm not a big fan of journalism schools, except those that are organized around a liberal arts education. Have an understanding of history, economics and political science - and then learn to write. — Tom Brokaw

Change was a constant in Walt Disney's commitment to tell a story well, to bring it to an audience through the technology of the day, and to push that technology so that rather than controlling the story, it enhanced the story and gave it an opportunity to touch people, to speak to each of them individually, to make it believable. — Newton Lee

Though, even if there were no such great advantage to be reaped from it, and if it were only pleasure that is sought from these studies, still I imagine you would consider it a most reasonable and liberal employment of the mind: for other occupations are not suited to every time, nor to every age or place; but these studies are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; they are companions by night, and in travel, and in the country. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

I got a liberal arts education just because I felt like I should to keep my parents happy, but it was for them. If it was up to me, I would've just moved to New York. — Kathryn Hahn

I wanted to go to a liberal arts college, I wanted to have that experience. — Mandy Patinkin

One of the things that is nice about these old pastors - they were young at the time - who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is. — Marilynne Robinson

Give a poet a pen — A. Jarrell Hayes

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

A new report says ISIS is trying to recruit professionals like doctors, engineers, and accountants. Sorry, kids, even ISIS says they're not hiring liberal arts majors. — Conan O'Brien

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

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. — Steve Jobs

'Tis certain that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions in which true virtue and honor consist. It rarely, very rarely happens that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, an honest man, whatever frailties may attend him. — David Hume

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

But if any man undertake to write a history, that has to be collected from materials gathered by observation and the reading of works not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him, undoubtedly, it is in the first place and above all things most necessary, to reside in some city of good note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and upon inquiry may hear and inform himself of such particulars as, having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many things, even those which it can least dispense with. — Plutarch

What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly - that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doesn't mean that the professor is equally open to any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects, views that exclude opposing or alternative views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a professor does hold, they have been arrived at unconstrained, or as unconstrained as possible, by anything except the requirement of honesty. — Louis Menand

Contrary to what some folks would have us believe, it is not tragic, even if undesirable, for a person to leave a liberal arts education not having read major works from this canon. Their lives are not ending. And the exciting dimension of knowledge is that we can learn a work without formally studying it. If a student graduates without reading Shakespeare and then reads or studies this work later, it does not delegitimize whatever formal course of study that was completed. — Bell Hooks

I went to a liberal arts college, and as part of my background, I was majoring in mathematics and physics. — James Heckman