“The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.”

With man, the life of the body depends on the life of the spirit.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

Joy, feeling one’s own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.

If the ways of the Almighty are not humanly logical, it is not the fault of the Almighty but of the limitations of human logic.

The person who is developing freely and naturally arrives at a spiritual equilibrium in which he is master of his actions, just as one who has acquired physical poise can move freely.

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

The problem we have is not Democrats versus Republicans. It is a Washington cartel. I’ve said many times the biggest divide we have politically is not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s between career politicians in both parties and the American people.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

We want a fully comprehensive trade deal that reflects our deep, ongoing relationship, the friendship between our two countries.

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.