Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

The modern university does not exist to teach alone...It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament...The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation.

The more that one studies the history of the building of the American nation, the clearer it becomes that it may be justly described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the world problems of tomorrow.

There are many things that go to make up an education, but there are just two things without which no man can ever hope to have an education and these two things are character and good manners.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method-more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records-of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

Optimism is the foundation of courage.