Robert Hutchins Quotes & Sayings

We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it. — Robert M. Hutchins

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away. — Robert M. Hutchins

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. — Robert M. Hutchins

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. — Robert M. Hutchins

Too few have the courage of my convictions. — Robert M. Hutchins

Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.' — Robert M. Hutchins

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

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

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

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

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

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one. — Robert M. Hutchins

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist. — Robert M. Hutchins

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria. — Robert M. Hutchins

Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician. — Robert Maynard Hutchins

The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die. — Robert M. Hutchins

Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised — Robert M. Hutchins

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

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

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

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

College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America. — Robert Maynard Hutchins

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

Anybody who feels at ease in the world today is a fool. — Robert M. Hutchins

Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible. — Robert M. Hutchins

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death — Robert M. Hutchins

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

The fullest development of the highest powers of men can be achieved only in a world of peace. — Robert M. Hutchins

The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phaedrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist — Robert M. Pirsig

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. — Robert Maynard Hutchins

The best education for the best is the best education for all. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

Whenever the urge to exercise comes upon me, I lie down for a while and it passes. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

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

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

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

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

For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

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

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

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness. — Robert M. Hutchins

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

Josh Hutchins's battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs. — Robert McCammon

At St. John's College, Annapolis, where Robert Hutchins' educational views have been most successfully practiced, they make, it is true, a great hubbub about science. The school's catalog boasts that more mathematics and laboratory work are required than at any other college, and there is even a pretentious listing of all pieces of apparatus used by the student, down to such items as compass, calipers, and ruler. But so heavy is the emphasis on highlights in the past history of science, that little time is left for acquiring a solid grasp of current scientific opinion. — Martin Gardner

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

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