No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

A strenuous effort must be made to train young people to think for themselves and take independent charge of their lives.

Yes, I am proud, and very humble too.

The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.

I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.

Our material eye cannot see that a stupid chauvinism is driving us from one noisy, destructive, futile agitation to another.

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

The immediate future is going to be tragic for all of us unless we find a way of making the vast educational resources of this country serve the true purpose of education, truth and justice.

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.

If the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself.

The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.

We are afraid of ideas, of experimenting, of change. We shrink from thinking a problem through to a logical conclusion.

I'd rather break stones on the king's highway than hem a handkerchief.

Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy.

We are bothered a good deal by people who assume the responsibility of the world when God is neglectful.

We have no firm hold on any knowledge or philosophy that can lift us out of our difficulties.

Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark.

It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.

I cannot explain it; but when difficulties arise, I am not perplexed or doubtful. I know how to meet them.

The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.

Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail start all over again and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose not the one you began with perhaps but one youll be glad to remember.

Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry the cry of the human spirit to be free.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

I view life as a learning experience. It is not so much all about music; it is about what happens when you are doing the music.

I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.

From this experience we have learned that in a big party it is important to have the necessary and often controversial discussions on policy issues such as the health system while in opposition.