Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

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

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

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.

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.

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.

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