These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Language is a living thing

The best school in the world will scarcely save a boy who hates the school and the purpose it serves and the society that created it.

The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same. They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people.

Bad teaching wastes a great deal of effort, and spoils many lives which might have been full of energy and happiness.

The teacher's chief difficulty is poverty. He (or she) belongs to a badly paid profession. He cannot dress and live like a workman, but he is sometimes paid as little as an unskilled laborer.

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.