College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.

It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.

The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.