On Education, Reading, and Knowledge
Education is the transmission of civilization.
—Will and Ariel Durant, 1968
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H. G. Wells, 1920
Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. [...] But to survive, we must learn.
1
—W. Edwards Deming, 1995
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn.
—Don Herold, 1926
***
Good teaching is forever, and the teacher is immortal.
—Jesse Stuart, 1958
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
—Jacques Barzun, 1945
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a
professional athlete earns in a whole week.
—Evan Esar, 1943
2
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
—Gail Godwin, 1974
***
1
Frequently paraphrased as “Learning is not compulsory; neither is survival”.
2
Note the date. The examples I see around nowadays indicate that this optimistic comparison is no
longer valid.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
K. K. Likharev (ed.), Essential Quotes for Scientists and Engineers,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63332-5_6
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