We should keep [the Panama Canal]. After all, we stole it fair and square.

Good teachers never say anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place.

I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.