“A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.”

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.

A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.

The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of “winning friends.

The one fact that I would cry form every housetop is this: the Good Life is waiting for us – here and now.

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.

Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.

It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.

The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.

If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.

No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.

Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.

Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites.

Providing all Latin-American children with the education and early childhood development that they need is in the best interest of all, so it has to be a priority for all of us, not only the government and civil society, but also the business sector.

He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.

It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way.

In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

Use the worst colour you can find in each place – it usually is the best.