The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.

The most developed science remains a continual becoming

Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.

It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious.