“We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”

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.

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

People said, Jane, forget about this nonsense with Africa. Dream about things you can achieve.

Let’s learn from the wisdom of every mother and father who teaches their daughters there is no limit on how big she can dream and how much she can achieve.

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

There is no disappointment so numbing as someone no better than you achieving more.

In most communities it is illegal to cry fire in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.

If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.