I will not say I failed 1000 times, I will say that I discovered there are 1000 ways that can cause failure

Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used used them.

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce.

I do not believe any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.

Education isn't play--and it can't be made to look like play. It is hard, hard work. But it can be made interesting work.

Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.