Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline.

Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.

The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them.

Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.

The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.