Young Students Quotes & Sayings

The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad. — Christopher Isherwood

Both of these students- both high school seniors both old enough to vote in the upcoming election- thought 'Al' Qaeda was a person. At that time the United States had been at war for five and a half years and here were two students two young adults leaving the educational system who had never heard of al Qaeda. Both by the way had passed the multiple-choice reading section of the state's high school exit exam. — Kelly Gallagher

Education should ennoble the students, but instead it is debasing them. Instead of shaping the young into diamonds, it is turning them into coals. It is not bringing transformation in them, It is not bestowing wisdom. — Sai Baba

When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men. — Rebecca Solnit

Act your age. Students do not look upon you as a buddy, pal, or peer. They expect you to be a mature adult ... Many young teachers have a tendency to seek popularity, resorting to tactics that can create endless problems. — Jim Brown

I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell. — Martin Luther

Or possibly- forgive me- you simply haven't decided what you want from life yet; you haven't found anything that you truly want to hold onto. That changes everything, you know. Students and very young people can rent with no damage to their intellectual freedom, because it puts them under no threat: they have nothing, yet, to lose. Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. All of a sudden you're playing for keeps, as children say, and it changes the very fabric of you. — Tana French

Clearly, Channing had not taught her young charges that the Declaration and Constitution, while two of the noblest documents in the history of humankind, were also, naturally, products of their time that reflected the limitations of their time (which, needless to say, is why the Constitution has been amended so many times since its ratification); no, she had taught them to revile the founding fathers - men whose vision, courage, and sacrifice made possible the freedom these students have known (and taken for granted) all their lives. These young women were incapable of grasping that the very criteria by which they presumed to judge the author of the Declaration and Constitution would not be available to them if not for those men's efforts. To say this, of course, is not to blame these students for their ignorance, but to underscore just how profoundly ill-served they are by courses of this sort. — Bruce Bawer

I can't tell you the number of times in high school I was allowed to be disappointed for not making the grade; it's a part of life. So the young students who are being taught by radical leftists in this country today are going to end up growing up in a world for which they are totally unprepared and unequipped. — Rush Limbaugh

Oh, sure," Gansey said, still cold and annoyed. "God forbid young men display their principles with futile but public protests when they could be skipping school and judging other students from the backseat of a motor vehicle."

"Principles? Henry Cheng's principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter," Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry's voice: "Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics. — Maggie Stiefvater

Young people know how important it is for dads to be involved in their lives. As I travel the country and talk with students, some of them tell me that their lives would be totally different if their father was around. — Arne Duncan

She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biological craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe ... She thought of a line from Nabokov: "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage - not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game. — Chris Bohjalian

Democrats have been doing everything they can to get young people and college students to vote in the midterms. Though if you want students to participate in something, maybe you shouldn't call them midterms. — Jimmy Fallon

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. — William Deresiewicz

Our children, our grandchildren, our students, our young athletes. We need to be pouring leadership principles into them constantly, and teaching, and instructing them how to become good leaders in the future. — Pat Williams

While I fold laundry I memorize things for school,
dates of wars:
French ones, African ones, Russian ones,
battles of all ugly kinds.
It's a shame to have us hopeful young students
learn these horrible things.
Exactly the kind of behaving
they have told us over and over again not to do
is what the history class is full of,
full-grown adults making these wars:
killing each other for land, for religions,
for greed and more greed,
Why bother to have children and educate them
and invent things to make their lives better,
just to send them off to war and get slaughtered? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I was born 50 years after slavery, in 1913. I was allowed to read. My mother, who was a teacher, taught me when I was a very young child. The first school I attended was a small building that went from first to sixth grade. There was one teacher for all of the students. There could be anywhere from 50 to 60 students of all different ages. — Rosa Parks

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy. — Dean Young

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organization that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it. — Jessica Valenti

I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison. — Bell Hooks

One of my young married students has suffered all her life because she was taught in her Church that she was born so sinful that the only way the wrath of God the Father could be appeased enough for him to forgive all her horrible sinfulness was for God the Son to die in agony on the cross. Without his suffering, the Father would remain angry forever with all his Creation.
Many of us have had a least part of that horror thrust on us at one time or other inour childhood. For many reasons I never went to Sunday School, so I was spared having a lot of peculiar teaching to unlearn. It's only lately that I've discovered that it was no less a person than St. Anselm who saw the atonement in terms of appeasement of an angry God, from which follows immediately the heresy that Jesus came to save us from God the Father. — Madeleine L'Engle

To all young people out there: This is the time you should be fearless but not jobless. Identify the right job, find what excited you the most, find what you are the most passionate about. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need. — Andrew Young

Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time. — Robertson Davies

I could do all of my activities at Howard because it was an environment that had essentially rid the ideology of false choices that I feel absolutely constricts young black students. — Kamala Harris

Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes. — Darren Shan

But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students - the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can - is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they are the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everybody thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are. — William Deresiewicz

1987: "We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture." Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can't even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what's needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. — Joshua Foer

Students may feel the criticism is harsh, but I think it's possible they haven't had criticism before. It's my job to point out when something is badly done, or when there's no point of view. To build a brand you have to have something about you. If not personality, then some thought process. I'm 40, and they're young, so they're meant to be informing me. They should be bringing me a book or something that I haven't seen, not like some obscure chant book by Dominican monks, but an image of the way they see the world. — Louise Wilson

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves. — Edward Hirsch

The bus stops and out get the sort of people who travel by bus between cities: students, old people--mainly women--and the middle-aged who cannot afford the train and who have never grown old enough to drive. Out we get, and away we go, the young, the old, and the failed girls. — Joanna Walsh

Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight? — Kenzaburo Oe

A young professor I watched in action at one of our large eastern colleges used to stand with his back to the class and mumble explanations of blackboard problems. He was "let out" at the end of two years because students refused to attend his classes. He was given an evasive reason for his dismissal and he left with justifiable bitterness toward the administration. If someone had told him the truth he could have avoided this denouement. Sometimes professors go on for years without any conception of remediable faults which irritate their listeners. — Mary Barnett Gilson

I remember some students in my high school who complained about the compulsory history classes. Young as we were, we didn't realize that the course was a privilege only countries at peace can afford. Elsewhere, — Kim Thuy

NASA's been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve, and it's sad that we are turning the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation it provides to young people. — Buzz Aldrin

Christ, it is sad, sad to see on quite a few of these faces - young ones particularly - a glum, defeated look. Why do they feel this way about their lives? Sure, they are underpaid. Sure, they have no great prospects, in the commercial sense. Sure, they can't enjoy the bliss of mingling with corporation executives. But isn't it any consolation to be with students who are still three-quarters alive? Isn't it some tiny satisfaction to be of use, instead of helping to turn out useless consumer goods? Isn't it something to know that you belong to one of the few professions in this country which isn't hopelessly corrupt? — Christopher Isherwood

School typically doesn't prepare young people for real life - unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life. — Ray Dalio

My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair. — James Vance

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with
sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles,
their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised
to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems
to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so
transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts
over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic
text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours
at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them:
coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near
the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and
unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are
oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
These are computer bums, compulsive programmers ... — Joseph Weizenbaum

There were the events of 1968 when young people began to ask their parents, what did you do in the war? And since the middle- or late-'70s, the French have been absolutely obsessed with the Vichy regime. They have an institute of contemporary history that turns out first-rate scholarly work. Their textbooks are accurate. Whether the students actually read them is another matter. — Robert O. Paxton

When I forget my own inner multiplicity and my own long and continuing journey toward selfhood, my expectations of students become excessive and unreal. If I can remember the inner pluralism of my own soul and the slow pace of my own self-emergence, I will be better able to serve the pluralism among my students at the pace of their young lives. — Parker J. Palmer

But artists aren't the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they're often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are "sent back" to recover the territory are always those who don't mind associating with the colored people! And it's a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers. — Bell Hooks

The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Princeton has made an enormous difference in my life, and I am delighted to be able to express my gratitude in such a tangible way. The generosity of earlier generations of donors made it possible for me to attend Princeton as a young student from Hong Kong, and I have always wanted to do all I could to assure that students in the future.. from the United States and around the world.. will have the same kinds of opportunities I had to learn from faculty members who are leaders in their fields at a university that remains second to none in its commitment to teaching. — Gordon Wu

Others burn out quickly from carrying the weight of salvation that has been piled upon their young shoulders. Several young Teach for America recruits have told me that their colleagues frequently run back home or off to graduate school with the belief that the children they went to save are unsalvageable - not because of poor teaching but because of their students' parents, families, or communities. — Lisa Delpit

If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it's clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women's sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they're acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we're the majority of undergraduate and master's students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don't make for good headlines, it seems. — Jessica Valenti

One of the most painful parts of teaching mathematics is seeing students damaged by the cult of the genius. The genius cult tells students it's not worth doing mathematics unless you're the best at mathematics, because those special few are the only ones whose contributions matter. We don't treat any other subject that way! I've never heard a student say, "I like Hamlet, but I don't really belong in AP English - that kid who sits in the front row knows all the plays, and he started reading Shakespeare when he was nine!" Athletes don't quit their sport just because one of their teammates outshines them. And yet I see promising young mathematicians quit every year, even though they love mathematics, because someone in their range of vision was "ahead" of them. — Jordan Ellenberg

The screams echoing through Janet's class were hard to bear. She was attempting a lecture on the Treaty of Paris while Mrs. Pachenko walked between the rows of desks insisting upon calm, raising a finger to her lips and whispering to individual students to please sit all the way down in their desks. In the back of the of the room, several kids were cheering as one of them, a young man whose shirt bore a flaming skull, stood hunched atop his desk like a motocross biker, sliding it forward in small hops. Students appear enthusiastic and are communicating well together, I wrote on the evaluation form. — Alissa Nutting

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler

You have to realize that your work is done by your body, and if your body is in very bad health, it's not going to work for you no matter how young you are. So, I'm a bit of an athletic coach when it comes to trying to respect my body's needs and tendencies, and when I teach students, I try and persuade them of the same. — Reynolds Price

An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in sticking little flowers on speeches. Style and substance and a sense of life are the things literature is composed of. One must use one's own personality in relationship to life and language, of course, and everyone has such a relationship. Some people find it, some don't find it, but it's there. — Marguerite Young

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, "I know how to add two numbers, but I'm not going to tell you." And they laugh and shout, "No!" That's so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?
Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love. — Margaret Edson

When the riot controls had been put into effect, and a nervous white population was waiting, it took little to set it off. In Wichita, a few white youths drove down into the black area and simply fired off guns. This brought black people out of their houses; in rage at seeing the harassment, they hurled stones or sticks at a passing car, and the battle was on. In that particular instance the police arrested the five whites who were armed and twelve young black men who had only rocks and sticks. All were jailed. The next morning, all were released on bail, but the bail set for the five armed whites was only one-fifth the amount set for the twelve unarmed black students. — John Howard Griffin

I receive emails from readers that both break my heart and give me a profound sense of connection. Several months ago, I received an email from a teacher who told me that 'Legend' was the first book one of her troubled young students had ever read to the end. He cried when he finished it. Stories like that stay with you forever. — Marie Lu

When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles. — Esther Dyson

At twenty two, he didn't have the foresight to understand how one decision could affect so many others. Now that he's older and everything has settled into a just-tolerable state of atrophy, the options he once had-options that his young students still have- feel like they've passed him by. — Jung Yun

Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, 250% in the Soviet Union, 400% in France, and more than 200% in China by 1965. Gaddis writes, What governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was. — John Gaddis

In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows. — Baruj Benacerraf

My mother did an incredible job - one, of just being a great mom, but two, of instilling a tremendous amount of empathy into me as a young man, as a young person. My mom was kind of this collector of people; throughout my childhood, it didn't matter who you were. She was a high school counselor and then a junior high counselor, and she didn't just counsel students, she counseled other teachers and administrators and coaches. — Morgan Spurlock

In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. — Christopher Alexander

James Buchan's The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian revolution: John Pitt, a young man from England who arrives in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974, and seventeen-year-old Shirin, one of John's students, whose father is a general in the shah's army. — Nancy Pearl

Even if he hadn't spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students - the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet. — Mary Doria Russell

It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think. — John Wesley Young

During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity. — Sal Albanese

They were students of the expressions of young women as they went in to confession, and they saw them as they came out and read the nature of the sin. — John Steinbeck

Young people will always need mentors to guide and support them. — Lailah Gifty Akita

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It's sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people. — Neil Armstrong

I get to work with incredibly talented young filmmakers and students, and their attitudes and relationship with film is still so pure. That re-inspires me and reminds me why I got into it and what I love about film, and allows me a little reprieve from the business side of it. And it rekindles my love of film. — James Franco

I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles - an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been. — Margaret Mahy

I'm constantly correcting young people and fashion students in this nation when they say "Well, I do couture." By definition, you don't. You have to be licensed by the government of France to do couture. So don't use that term. You can say that you do one-of-a-kind, you can say it's custom, but you can't say it's couture - because it's inaccurate. — Tim Gunn

Where students talk about being independent and on their own, you will find them practicing the most rigid conformity in dress, in speech, in moral attitudes, and in thinking. Sometimes they follow fashion at the expense of integrity. They dread to be alone. They do not want to stand out or be different. They want to conform. After they graduate from college, many of these young people want nothing more than a good job with a big firm, and a home somewhere in suburbia. But they don't find security. — Billy Graham

There are, Jefferson said, two classes of "disputants" that are especially common. The "first is . . . young students . . . the other consists of the ill-tempered & rude men in society, who have taken up a passion for politics." From both, Jefferson urged, "keep aloof, as you would from the infected subjects of yellow fever or pestilence. Consider yourself, when with them, as among the patients of Bedlam, needing medical more than moral counsel. — Davidson Butler

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. — A.S. Byatt

We are in a time, because of the proliferation of online media and a hundred channels on cable, where teenagers and young adults and eight- and nine-year-olds do not read enough. And the SAT is very unforgiving for students who do not read. — Jonathan Grayer

Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners-where Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication is part of every interaction are communities of learning, rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a safe and exciting place of exploration where they can share feelings and ideas, and where each child is recognized, valued and nurtured. — Riane Eisler

Upon its debut, The Room was a spectacular bomb, pulling in all of $1,800 during its initial two-week Los Angeles run. It wasn't until the last weekend of the film's short release that the seeds of its eventual cultural salvation were planted. While passing a movie theater, two young film students named Michael Rousselet and Scott Gairdner noticed a sign on the ticket booth that read: NO REFUNDS. Below the sign was this blurb from a review: "Watching this film is like getting stabbed in the head." They were sold. — Greg Sestero

When I was 17, I taught music; I had 65 students a week, and I did that for a year. So that's pretty regular. But it was great to give the gift of music to people, seeing them learn. It's great to influence young people in a creative way. — Matt Schulze

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home is redefined as a problem. — Ellen Willis

When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. "Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up — Ursula K. Le Guin

We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don't learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality. — Anonymous

Most students are presented only with the evolutionary belief system in their schools, and they are censored from hearing challenges to it. Let our young people understand science correctly and hear both sides of the origins issue and then evaluate them. — Ken Ham

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books. — Cynthia Voigt

College campuses are a focus of prevention efforts for meningococcal disease because of the increased incidence of the disease during adolescence and young adulthood, as well as transmission from crowded living conditions and social behaviors common among college students. — Erik Paulsen

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York. — Chris Raschka

I am happy that thousands of students, young designers and fashion people will be able to see and study my work in every aspect of it. — Valentino Garavani

When you have strict censorship of the internet, young students cannot receive a full education. Their view of the world is imbalanced. There can be no true discussion of the issues. — Ai Weiwei

I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. — Vandana Shiva

The Assembly passed a budget that makes the right choices for young students across the state by helping schools avoid cutting essential educational programs, laying off teachers and increasing local property taxes. Without a sound investment in our children and their education, New York would face crumbling school buildings, overcrowded classrooms, and few opportunities to excel. — Jose Peralta

If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they're killing each other now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women at the rate going on now. We'd not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism. — Spike Lee

Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity. The young must be dampened down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment. — Frank Herbert

Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one special part of the whole and does not think of how what they are doing relates to the larger picture. For example, in education, a teacher might say in the next class he was going to "explain Young's modulus and how to measure it," rather than, "I am going to educate the students and prepare them for their future careers". — Richard Hamming

Politics is clearly a not so happening topic in our young blood. I could clearly see many students yawning. Some might have been discussing the new Shakira video amongst themselves, the one shown on MTV these days. Bloody donkeys, if it was a porno movie featuring an interracial orgy, their eyes might have ogled out and ears might have become sensitive to the oohs and aahs but not for causes of the nation. Hrmpf ... youth power indeed! — Faraaz Kazi

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. 'What's the point?' he said. 'Kids aren't getting jobs.' You never hear faculty talk that way. He did. — Daniel Amory

The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything. — Ai Weiwei

Father, help these young people to see. Help them to show the world that our greatness is not in things we do for ourselves, but in things we do for others. In power that channels itself into kindness, in a hand outstretched in love. Be with these determined students. Help them to believe, when the naysayers come, that you make all things possible. "'And, — Lisa Wingate

For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students. — H.P. Lovecraft

The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances, and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking. — Craig Clevenger

In my opinion it is unwise to judge a young man by his school record. We have too many examples of bad students becoming distinguished men, and, on the other hand, of brilliant students not being at all remarkable in life. — Frank Wedekind

I tell students and young professionals all the time to follow their hearts, do what they truly love, and if it's business, run it by being grounded in ethical consciousness. — John Mackey